Global competition is accelerating the growth in Research and Development investment by 7% per year. Research is an absolute necessity for the survival of companies.
The International R&D Scoreboard, that each year looks at the top 1,250 world companies for investment has classified the top 50 companies for research spending. Only one company from Italy is there: Finmeccanica at the 50th position.
Italy is not present among the top 10 world nations for research and development. It is overtaken by the United States, Japan, Germany and even South Korea, Switzerland and Finland.
It’s a given fact that the companies that invest in research, manage to grow and increase their market share. This is not happening in our country for many reasons.
Among these are the lack of mechanisms provided by the State to give incentives to companies to invest; the inability to keep young researchers in Italy as they prefer to emigrate because of the lack of conditions favourable to their professional development; the destination of dividends to shareholders in a disproportionate way rather than to research and development as for example has been happening for years in Telecom Italia.
These are all urgent topics to be tackled by the Government to set the economy going again.