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Business Support Services
Oak Tree Press, Feb 2003, Pages: 259
The book deals with business support services – in other words, with those services, originating in a public policy initiative, that aim to assist enterprises or entrepreneurs to develop their business activity successfully and to respond effectively to the challenges of their business environment. Business support services are a common feature of innovation policies at national, and especially regional and local, level in all industrial economies, as well as a necessary requirement for developing economies.
Examples of business support services include:
- The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) in the US
- Business Link – Small Business Service in England
- Syntens in the Netherlands
- ALMI in Sweden
- The “real service” centres in Italy.
The European Union has identified the creation of “top class business services” as one of the main priorities in its policy for small and medium-sized enterprises.
The potential readership of this book is made up of people belonging to two different communities:
- The research community
- The growing international community of managers, technologists, policy-makers etc., who are directly involved in the design of support service policies and in the management of service centres.
Social and economic research has become increasingly interested in “governance”. When we talk about governance, it is often more clear in our minds what it is not than what it is. Governance is not government nor is it market. It is “directed influence of social processes”. It is a result of the search for some third way between the iron rules of markets and the rusty rules of governments, which are increasingly unable to steer social processes.
Industrial and innovation policies live nowadays under the double challenge of globalisation and of the fragmentation of domestic policy processes. For industrial and innovation policies, governance is not just a theoretical concern. The question is not only “how”, but “if” public bodies still have a chance to “interfere” with the dynamics of contemporary economic systems.
Business support services are a good experimental ground in which to test the reality of governance in contemporary economies. The “servant State” is not giving up the special characteristics of its legitimacy, power, know-how, mission, etc., but fully accepts its role in the new game of interdependent policy-making.
How can policy realise the objectives of promoting innovation and economic growth in these new conditions? This has been a major research question for economists and social scientists during the past decades. It is what I explore in this book – in detail and in very concrete terms.
Practitioners have a different reason to read this book. Business support services have been around for some time and are now undergoing a phase of transition. In several countries, the whole system of assistance to small and medium-sized companies has undergone a reappraisal and a thorough reform. Support service providers are clearly exiting the age of experimentalism and entering a new phase: that of professionalism.
But they lack a “toolbox”. So far, support service providers have borrowed concepts and tools from “other” cultures: primarily the culture of public administration and the managerial culture of companies. This is not surprising, because support service providers developed in the interstice between public and private sectors and it is from those two worlds (the State and the companies) that support service providers have drawn their human resources.
The shift from experimentalism to professionalism is also the shift from a borrowed culture to an autonomous culture, from a borrowed toolbox to an appropriate and specific toolbox. This shift requires the construction of a cultural identity. This book is a contribution to the quest for a new, distinctive identity for business support services. Practitioner readers may not find solutions, but they will be helped in asking themselves, their staff and their “bosses” the right questions.
About the Author
Nicola Bellini holds a MA from Johns Hopkins University (USA) and is Associate Professor of Business Economics at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa (Italy), where he is currently director of a research centre on innovation and territorial systems. Previously, he worked as research fellow in the economic research institute “Nomisma” in Bologna and as advisor for economic policy and planning in the Office of the President of the Region Emilia-Romagna. He also taught at the University of Sassari and at the Stanford University centre in Florence.
He is author of several books and articles on industrial policy issues, with special reference to regional innovation policies and area marketing. He has written extensively in the field of business support services. In 1998, he authored a “stock-taking” paper on this subject for the OECD.
Nicola Bellini has also a significant practical experience in the management of business support services. From 1997 to 2002, he was chairman of the board of Pont-Tech, a provider of technological services, established by the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, the University of Pisa, the Province of Pisa, three City Councils, the company Piaggio Spa and two entrepreneurial associations, to support SMEs in the industrial area of Pontedera. Previously, he had been member of the board of CITER, the information centre for the textile and clothing industry of the Region Emilia-Romagna.
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