In a bubble, asset prices become disconnected from reasonable expectations of the future earnings of those assets. Markets fail to get prices right. This mis-pricing gets reinforced and exaggerated by herd behaviour, or irrational exuberance. Investors convince themselves that someone else will pay even higher prices for the assets in future.
Innovation 8. A long-standing problem whose importance has increased in Italy in the more recent decades is the very low level of spending in research and development (R&D).