The economic historian Joel Mokyr holds that a key factor in the British industrial revolution of the eighteenth century was precisely the abundance of high-quality professional and craft skills: Effective use of knowledge, however, required not only access and incentives to create and access new technology, but also the competence to make use of it and to carry out the “instructions” contained in the blueprint of the technique.
Much of the knowledge employed by artisans and engineers was “tacit”, that is, not formally written down in the “recipe” used for production, but little tricks and know-how based on experience or imitation. 17 On this terrain Italy is not necessarily at a disadvantage.