Rationale

The Digital Divide is becoming the expression of an asymmetry in the access to knowledge and in the capability to use it in order to radically renew models, processes, and development dynamics. This knowledge is required particularly to reduce the unequal capabilities and to seize the benefits coming from the diffusion and the effective use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and hence leapfrog in the age of globalization, digital networks and knowledge.

For Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in particular, globalization offers two seemingly opposite directions: On one hand it promises to provide SMEs with access to new markets, whereas, on the other hand, it fundamentally allows newcomers from abroad to enter SMEs domestic markets.

In this view it is necessary to invest in Human Capital (capabilities, skills and experiences of human resources), Structural Capital (technologies, processes, practices, demonstrators, patents and brands) and Social Capital (the web of relationships and cooperation).

The complementarities among those factors are at the heart of the redefinition of the international division of labour and production. Those factors stand in fact at the basis of any initiative aiming to redefine development strategies and to design growth patterns which will not passively replicate all the stages of industrial development, but will allow for a direct leapfrog into the knowledge-based economy.

This is a challenge for Universities, which are required to invent new ways of re-organizing their knowledge base, new ways of producing knowledge and new learning processes, as well as adopting entrepreneurial behaviours. Moreover, it is necessary to note that knowledge production is no more an exclusive domain of Universities, rather it is a social phenomenon that originates in the complex interactions between universities, enterprises, public institutions and the society as a whole.