Ethical entrepreneurship and innovation in Ragusa: a sustainable model

Over the past few days, I happened to meet, in Ragusa, a group of entrepreneurs engaged on several fronts - from agriculture to services, from the iron and steel industry to logistics - for a conversation on the themes of responsibility, sustainability and, more generally, of doing business in areas that tend to be problematic, such as the Mezzogiorno. That this initiative claimed its own originality was evident right from the choice of venue: the Ricca Innovation Center, the very elegant headquarters of Ricca It, one of the most active companies in the field of innovation, confirming a decades-long history that began seventy years ago in the mechanical sector and now, in its third generation, has moved into information technology applied to cybersecurity services, artificial intelligence, and the management and implementation of supercomputing centres. But it was not the leap from mechanics to information technology that conferred a kind of Olivettian allure on both this entrepreneurial reality and the others present in the meeting, but rather the ethical perspective they share, the social role they play, as a community experience at the service of a territory and also as a testimony of loyalty to a project strongly rooted in the fabric of an ethical and enlightened Sicily, which the writer Vittorini would have defined as the home of Gran Lombardi. This is a crucial issue for the fate of the Mezzogiorno, through which passes the way to restore the hope of development to the territories and communities that have put down roots there, all the more so if one intends to stem the process of depopulation following the new emigration of young and old forces. Reasoning precisely in terms of responsibility, for the entire duration of the meeting, the topic taken up as a common denominator by the entrepreneurs present had the effect of elevating Olivetti's name to a paradigm, if only in ideal terms, as an exemplary model of an experience as distant in time as it is persuasive in terms of its teaching power; an experience that evidently continues to act in the assumptions of a Mezzogiorno in discontinuity with the legacies that have fuelled, often deforming it, its very image over time. It is worth recalling, at this point, the results of the analysis by Gian Paolo Manzella and Marcella Panucci, contained in the recent 'Quaderno Svimez', Tra competitività e coesione. Vicende della politica industriale Ue (1958-2025). The last part of the work concerns the relationship between the need for development, which lies at the heart of the debate on the neo-question of the south, and the opportunities that Europe makes available. The authors of the survey speak, in fact, of a 'European opportunity' and they do so with good reason, insisting on the valorisation of what has become the physiognomy of southern industry today, starting with the sectors in which it demonstrates the greatest competitiveness: from automotive (85% of Italian cars are produced in Abruzzo, Basilicata, Campania and Molise) to cleantech (wind power, photovoltaics), which in Catania meets one of the productive realities, such as Enel 3Sun, destined to become the largest solar factory on the old continent. Bringing together the industrial policies drawn up in Brussels and the expectations of decentralised territories with patchy development, such as the province of Ragusa, for example, is a challenge that from several points of view, if it involved only the resources of technocracy, could see its chances of success reduced. Increasingly, it is necessary to invoke the presence of other figures around this programmatic discourse, that of the humanists in particular, i.e. those who demand the right to speak in the name of a long-standing cultural tradition. And this is also indirectly reminded to us by Manzella and Panucci in the "Quaderno Svimez" when they trace the reasoning back to the figure of Altiero Spinelli. In the 1970s, when he held the position of commissioner for industry in the government headed by Franco Maria Malfatti, he imagined an idea of development that took into consideration the quality of life and territorial balances, he went so far as to enunciate the community character of the various government actions and thought of an economy that for each European state would proceed bearing in mind the distinction between the European and national levels.