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The decline of international competitiveness of European companies began in the early 1970s and since then there has been no reversal of the trend. In recent years, also due to the growing concentration of investments caused by the 'Oversize Economy' (Brondoni, 2019), the degree of technological advancement of Europe, the United States and China has lost all relationship with the size of their respective Gross National Product. In fact, investments in technology grow when the resources of a large developed or developing market are coordinated by a system of large corporations and finalized by a policy of applied research put at the service of a design capable of mobilizing the resources of an entire country.

Cost analysis is a method to enhance the costs efficiency by evaluating the corporate profitability. In today business environment of global competition, war pressures, new markets and demographics, firms are changing their approach to cost control. In fact, the strategic cost analysis provides useful information for the short and long-term decision-making in order to achieve the growth corporate goals. In the current phase of global competition (Global Shortage Management) corporations must adapt their strategic cost analysis (Value Analysis, Value Engineering or Value Management) to specific competitive policies adopted in certain markets, which may concern 'Planned Obsolescence', 'Total Quality Management (TQM)' or 'Zero Defects Productions' objectives

In this paper, we review the literature on industrial ecosystems and EU Taxonomy of sustainable activities. We then measure the size, dynamics and specialisation of the industrial ecosystems in Italy - as defined by the European Commission. Subsequently, we try to assess how much different sectors will be involved in the Taxonomy of sustainable activities: Manufacturing, Transportation, Electricity and Water Supply are those strongly involved in terms of employees. EU Taxonomy will radically change in the near future the financial reporting requirements and strategic management actions in the corporate system towards green transition. Firms need to improve their level of knowledge of the Taxonomy and identify suitable actions in order to align with it.

The continuation of the war in Ukraine and the appearance of the BRICS+ have consolidated some critical issues that appeared at the beginning of the war, including the rise in the prices of energy and food raw materials. In global markets, companies are nowadays exposed to a fierce competition and new socio-environmental forces on a vast scale. For global companies, the ongoing geopolitical changes increase corporate and network profit risks, but also represent new, great opportunities for corporate management on long-term trends.

The Russian-Ukrainian war introduced new elements into the strategic management of large global corporations. Recently, the marketplace of international companies has found a specific growth element, defined in the so-called BRICS+, that is changing competitive horizons and developing new models of management. In global markets, the managerial economics imposes an adaptive policy of corporate social responsibility, dominated by economic sustainability and eco-responsibility, with corporate conduct that is not always truthful and effective. From the beginning of 2010s and up to these 2020 years, a fifth phase of globalization (Competitive Landscapes Globalization) produced a structural change of competitive horizons, with policies of innovation and imitation focused on oversize management, the obsessive task of cost reductions, the worldwide localization of productions based on alliances, joint ventures and accords, that have developed multi-polar network organizations.

The Russian-Ukrainian War introduced new elements into the strategic assessments of large global corporations, changing competitive horizons and developing new models of competition. The impact of the recent BRICS expansion on the global corporations management and on the growth of sustainability goals reflects a growing global new competitive landscape that places global corporations in a delicate position as a possible counterweight to the EU, to the U.S and to the Asian World.

This study reviews whether award-winning firms show improved performance and receive a positive reaction from the market in accordance with theoretical expectations. The market anticipates that award winners and certified firms will achieve more positive performance compared to other firms within an industry. However, the existing literature shows inconsistent results. As the authors of this study, we attempt to assess whether being awarded or receiving certification adequately compensates the firm’s efforts to obtain such achievements. Furthermore, we strive to provide the rationale to explain why the results of previous studies are inconsistent. Finally, we offer four propositions to effectively investigate the association between such achievements and the reactions of the market and the firm's performance.

This study takes the triple bottom-line perspective to compare the communications of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in some of world’s top automakers’ mission statements and the CEO’s introductory letters to annual CSR reports before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Content analysis based on Text Network Analysis (TNA) approach was deployed to examine the central messages and sub-themes of these documents based on CSR goals, time-orientation, and stakeholder groups, and then statistically compared within and among companies. Results reveal that Automakers’ mission statements collectively emphasized profit and customers, whereas CSR letters prioritized planet, people, and general society. As the pandemic progressed, the emphasis on people increased, indicating that organizations shifted their CSR focus towards supporting employees and local communities. However, the attention to profit and planet goals remained constant during the studied period.

The attitude of large companies towards the issue of sustainability has evolved considerably over time. In a first phase sustainability was seen as a necessary evil. Today, in global markets, the financial world seeks and rewards sustainable companies. In global competition, the companies’ results cannot be evaluated just in terms of value generated for the shareholders profit: the shared value generated has become the key factor for success. Globalization is not a policy managed by human forces, but it’s a condition of life for humans on this planet. In line with this assumption the aim of this series of articles, dedicated to sustainable management, is to analyse the recent global findings related to the sustainability issues, in topics like communication, human capital, intangible factors, small and large enterprises, retail and fashion, as well as in well-being orientation.

Health and safety in the workplace should be an integral part of any sustainable organization, regardless of its size, sector and geographical sphere of operations. To ensure and maintain a healthy and safe work environment, companies should constantly identify and prevent all factors that could provoke work-related injuries and diseases. In particular, in today’s rapidly changing context, companies should carefully consider not only the traditional risks to the employees’ health and safety, but also the emerging ones associated with the ecological transition, the increasing digitalization of business processes, and the impact of climate change on working conditions. Adopting a theoretical approach, this study aims at explaining the relationship between occupational health and safety and corporate sustainable success.

We empirically investigate the simultaneous relationship between the various types of intangible assets and their effects on eco-innovation adoption through a sample of Italian manufacturing firms. The results highlight a positive influence of the intangibles on the likelihood to invest in eco-innovation. We observe, when focusing on the human capital, that while investments in only employee training only directly affect eco-innovation, the investments in management training for new business models indirectly influence eco-innovations by triggering the other intangible assets (R&D and intellectual property, Organizational capital, Open innovation).

With COVID-19, many businesses have failed, while other industries and corporations have seen profits increase, and are likely to continue to do so post-pandemic, in line with the trend of the oversize economy. Coronavirus 2019 has caused a major economic shock, in addition to its tremendous impact on global health, pushing the biggest corporations towards an outburst of the new, basic drivers of global capitalism (Health; Energy; Food; Communication). That is, the pillars of global competition that start from an oversize management in order to fix the competitive landscapes of large corporations.

Global corporations operate today in conditions of highly competitive tension in a context subject to political, social and technological instability. In recent years, the Greek economic crisis of 2009 showed the new basic drivers of global capitalism (Health; Energy; Food; Communication). In global network organisation, the importance of ‘corporate network value’ emerges, and intangible corporate assets (identity, culture, information system) acquire huge importance. The advent of new technologies and the growth of AI offer significant opportunities for creating value not only at business scale but also at societal level. For the future growth of global corporations, the challenge is to conciliate the profitability imperative with a business model compatible with the objective of a sustainable development and in a logic of stakeholders’ engagement.

The 4th Industrial Revolution (4.0 IR), fundamentally disrupts the technologies characterizing the first three industrial revolutions. In the nowadays global management phase (competitive globalisation), the business model based on excess supply (i.e., over-supply model, in which competitors face volatile production and progressively falling prices) is now inadequate for aggressive global corporate policies. Producing more and wasting less require today a new global business model based on the progressive disappearance of marginal global companies (oversize economy, characterized by lower production and sales costs, and by large company size). Standardized production has now fallen into a crisis that drives companies towards 4.0 technologies i.e., in the pursuit of new conditions of efficiency that are more open to innovation, towards productive flexibility, and even towards competitive imitation.

Since 2010, globalisation has imposed a new view of the competitive environment in which competitors are not always direct rivals. On the contrary, as a result of alliances and agreements, certain firms can become mega-organisations that have the potential to change the long-term competitive structure of sectors (oversize economy). In the emerging oversize economy, mega corporations (The Coca-Cola Company, McDonald’s, Apple, for instance) manage competition adopting firm policies focused on shareownership, co-ownership and stock splits. The Coca-Cola Company accountability for sustainability creates a range of outcomes including diverse beverage products; economic benefits such as jobs, taxes paid and community investment; ecosystem impacts and initiatives; and customer and shareowner value.

The 4th Industrial Revolution is expected to lead to a paradigm shift in business, with strong effects on manufacturing and service processes, and consequent competitive advantages for firms, industries, and regional/national systems. Such effects will manifest in the disruption of traditional incumbents and the re-organization of production processes where information and communication technologies, artificial intelligence, and operational technologies enable smart, self-organizing distribution systems in factories

A global firm's success is conditioned by its ability to manage the system of intangible corporate assets (corporate culture, corporate identity, and information system) and intangible product assets (product design, brand equity and pre/after-sales services). Corporate imitation and innovation processes are a primary condition to compete in global markets and entail identifying and proposing design management products with 'new' features that change over time and space. Product design defines the functions that qualify a product or service to identify and organise the distinctive specifications of the firm’s offer, and develop goods and services based on the analysis of competition and demand needs (customer satisfaction). Competitive design management can be oriented towards different forms of flexible production (The Fourth Industrial Revolution), specifically related to products based on planned obsolescence, total quality, or a rigid competitive philosophy of zero defects.

Grocery Retailing is facing many challenges and digital transformation is required for a market-driven space competition. The paper analyses the major trends of technology adoption in grocery retailing and integrates them in the wider framework of Industry 4.0. New networks and network economies derive, and new issues for management emerge.

Innovation is creating robots and computers that are able to perform many tasks previously accomplished by man. The place occupied by men in the job field will shrink. The current organization and the existence of many jobs are in danger. In the article we discuss the treats and opportunities of using ICT in business and the impact on business models and on the human’s job. Through a survey on Italian business context we observe the awareness of the people directly involved in decision making and in designing future work in the firms. The consciousness of the people on the effects of the diffusion of ICT matches with the opportunities for doing business. How to find the right equilibrium between the two perspectives?

The circular economy is considered by international institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union as the most urgent strategy to orient the economic development model towards sustainability. To find concrete applications, the circular economy requires greater awareness in consumers and businesses. The Italian paper industry, which boasts high levels of competitiveness at an international level, has initiated important restructuring and rationalization processes over the last decade with a view to recycling and sustainability. Only the final phase of the production process is yet to comply with all circular economy criteria, that is, the recovery of production waste (pulper). Hence, the actual technological and strategic challenge of the paper industry is to phase out landfilling of recyclable waste and implement energy recovery strategies, as well as promoting the use of renewable sources.

One of the premises of rising neoliberalism from the 1980s had been the claim of Ronald Reagan that government is the problem not the solution, readily endorsed, in parallel, by Margaret Thatcher on coming into government. Drawing on a range of international examples this paper shows that this was utterly uninformed, that deregulation of finance in the US led to the worst financial crisis in 2008 since 1929 and that Thatcher's scrapping of the 1970s Labour governments' industrial policy instruments led to major de-industrialisation in the UK which influenced the 'No' vote in the 2016 referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union. While the US nonetheless pursued an industrial policy by stealth which promoted a range of advanced technology corporations and that Germany, embodying liberal market principles after WW2, recently has endorsed the case for not only a German but also European industrial policy and led in advocating a European Green New Deal modelled on the Roosevelt New Deal which recovered the US from The Depression of the early 1930s and convinced Truman to support the Marshall Aid programme that also recovered Western Europe after the cataclysm of WW2.

Across Europe, businesses and policy makers are now worried about the future industries dominated by U.S. and Chinese companies. Since the financial and economic global crisis in 2007, western industrialized countries experienced a return to stronger state interventions in the business. States, which had previously been reluctant to intervene, implemented intervenes for individual companies or industrial measures for whole sectors. Moreover, the pandemic has driven Asian countries to double down on the tradition of state intervention. The specific causes of the coronavirus global recession, however, impose a radical and targeted solution. Governments should enter in key-sectors and cover directly wages and maintenance costs for critical businesses facing shutdown. In this context of Government direct involvement in global business, it is very useful to remember the lesson from the genesis of Japan’s motorcycle global leaders: Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki and Yamaha.

Today, large-scale retailers and industrial companies cannot ignore the impacts generated by their activity. Consequently, they are increasingly adopting behaviors attentive to issues related to corporate social responsibility. Italian distributors, driven by consumers, the regulatory system and stakeholders, also demonstrate a growing commitment to initiatives characterized by an orientation towards sustainability, which is often developed through supply chain collaborations.

Circular economy business models essentially fall into two main groups: (1) models focused on reorienting traditional business, and (2) models that involve creating a new business specifically aimed at recovering resources. The timing and ways of transforming an old business into a circular one could find useful drivers in a systemic approach that involves policy makers and legislators to implement effective regulations and incentives, the financial sector, public authorities and civil society. By converse, big global corporations often develop circular economy within a company’s network. From this perspective, some companies are specifically oriented towards recycling, while other companies belonging to the same group use raw materials obtained from recycling, thus gaining an extensive competitive advantage for all the network’s companies (competitive circular economy).

This paper analyses how blockchain technology works in agri-food supply chains. It also intends to identify the benefits and limitations associated with the potential widespread use of this technology to improve efficiency and sustainability performance. Despite the undeniable benefits of blockchain and the possible improvements to enhance transparency, reliability and accuracy of information, considerable challenges to its widespread adoption persist. The transformational potential of blockchain technology can be unlocked by: a) the creation of a pre-competitive space for unprecedented horizontal collaboration amongst supply chain actors to reduce cost and maximise benefits; b) the redesign of centralised governance systems of existing tracking and information-sharing platforms; c) the integration of blockchain and Internet of Things devices.

The history of Champagne Encry is marked by the courage and the strong desire to embark on a journey that makes us unique in the world of Champagne. The art of making Champagne has grown together with the value of our wines and merged wisely with the emotion and passion to create the finest champagne Encry.

In 2014, the luxury fashion market closed with a value of 224 billion euros marking a growth at constant exchange rates of 3 percent and driven primarily by the online channel, and the outlet one. This Special Issue on ‘Fashion and Luxury Management’ aims to highlight some features of the High-End Italian Companies pertaining to the fashion and luxury industry of Made in Italy, and their key drivers of growth such as innovation, craftsmanship, creativity, and sustainability.

U2 Supermarket and private label products are the main strategic levers that qualify the development of UNES. U2 is a "countercurrent Supermarket” that combine the Every Day Low Price (EDLP) business model with the offer of a wide range of private label products often subject to innovation in order to satisfy changeable customers’ needs.

Since 2012 the Italian Government has been engaged in the creation of a far-reaching legislative package aimed at supporting the development of the national start-up ecosystem. Drawing from policy suggestions by key players of the Italian innovation ecosystem, the so-called Italian Startup Act encompasses a vast and diversified array of tools affecting all stages of the lifecycle of newly established high-tech businesses. Data regarding the impact of the policy are publicly accessible and are subject to continuous reporting, culminating in the issuance of the Annual Relation to the Italian Parliament by the Italian Minister of Economic Development.

Tourism has often been described as an economic driving force that contributes to rural and emerging economies development. However, when it comes to the social aspect of development the nature of this contribution is still debated by academics. Information and Communication Technologies can help enhancing the socio-economic contribution of tourism by fostering community-based tourism independent marketing and sales dis-intermediation. eT4D can be defined as the independent use of technologies by micro and small community based tourism firms to market and sell their products and services thus fostering local socio-economic development.

Innovation is historically linked to the creation of large departments of Research & Development (R&D) that require large investments in assets. With markets globalization, the department of R&D remains one of the pillars of innovation, but it needs a rethinking of the management. The new R&D department needs to change by a vision of closing within the corporate boundaries to an opening view to the outside. Product development is carried out through several conducts taken by companies ranging from Reverse R&D processes to collaborations with direct competitors for the sharing of risks and knowledge. Generally, and more precisely in high-tech industry, technological advancements and the ability to develop fast-cycle processes by followers are generating an abatement of the timely barriers that allowed first movers to maintain competitive advantages; so, in global markets, the management of imitative strategies becomes of primary importance.

Since the 80s, given the markets globalisation springing up (product globalisation), the ‘core activity’ of R&D was focused on corporate internal structures. In the 90s and 2000s the new globalisation phase (firm globalisation), the R&D has faced a remarkable transformation. In fact the R&D was no longer centralized in the headquarters, but localized according to the network logic, with a competitive advantage optimization in reference to specific local companies. Finally, since the early 2000s, a third globalisation phase (finance globalisation), has determined a new and important shift in research and development activities. The globalisation of markets pushed the firms to face not only increasing competitive dynamics but also to handle and to manage the limits deriving from the global economies of scale, recessive markets and, frequently, from the over-supply condition. In the nowadays globalisation phase (competitive globalisation), characterized by a widespread recession, and by many over-supplied markets, the R&D structures assume a new key-role for the firms development and represent a continuous stimulus for the competitive dynamics.

In open markets where competition is strong, innovation loses its role of ‘ideological hierarchy’ over imitation; both have the common goal of maximising company profitability, with the constraint of optimising performance results in the very short term. With these objectives and result constraints, the success of research and development activities is measured by the real improvement in the competitive supply potential, expressed by indicators such as time-to-market or patent use rate. The capacity to exploit the competition acquires prime importance, while the capacity to accumulate know-how becomes less important (for example with the traditional indicators of the number of patents per year).

World cities are boosted by Nation-States to encourage and control the innovation processes, developing specific attractiveness factors for companies focused on knowledge production. The role of world cities as a knowledge hub is linked to the one of knowledge production-city, since in global cities there are high-knowledge producers, consumers and workers. It is possible to identify three models of global urban development, each one differing from the other for the degree of knowledge production and intangible consumption attracted and promoted within the city: the model of no-knowledge production; the model of low-knowledge production and the model of high-knowledge production.

In global markets, shopping centres are becoming important agents, defining the kind and quality of intangible features of supplies, not only establishing the assortments, but also affecting the consumption behaviour atmosphere that they determine in all its aspects. In this way, shopping malls are responsible for the quality of the intangible consumption process which has a profound impact on people and on the community that people live in. That is why shopping centres, both physical and virtual (i.e. e-commerce sites and other kinds of virtual marketplaces), are significant in big towns, where commercial density is high. By defining the intangible aspects of consumption, shopping centres determine the development of a particular geographical area (normally surrounding a big city) because they are able to concentrate demand, and they play an active role in establishing the choice alternatives, which means forging the consumption habits and expectations of populations and cities.

Global markets are revolutionising the basic concepts of research, manufacturing and marketing, and developing corporate networks based on competitive alliances. In global managerial economics, knowledge management thus becomes the crucial competitive factor, creating knowledge production hubs, particularly in cities with a high level of intangible consumption, where people, capital and ideas are concentrated (consumer hubs). The level of aggregation of knowledge production and intangible consumption classifies large conurbations with unconventional metrics, establishing new types of scales for ‘world cities’.

In hyper-competitive markets, innovation is critical for the growth of marketdriven companies. An examination of case studies of highly competitive global companies in the fast fashion sector, reveals that detailed understanding of the market, deriving from direct management of their stores, enables Zara, Gap and H&M to develop an innovation management capability. This is a fundamental competitive driver for the company’s success.

The effectiveness of corporate governance processes on global markets entails the adoption of ramified internal control systems, and the adaptation of the variables that are significant to this end to respond to the evolution of surrounding conditions. Analysis of the changes that have taken place in the main variables on which global companies concentrate their attention and their controls reveals, in particular, a growing need to evolve from the dominance of tangible components to a situation that takes intangible assets into due consideration. We refer to the corporate culture and the information system which represent both elements on which the effectiveness of governance processes is based and factors to be monitored with suitable internal control procedures.

Since the early ‘80s, the global economy has radically changed companies, manufacturing system and products. Global managerial economics demands ramified, far-flung and strongly interconnected organisations (networks). These complex structures favour knowledge management skills, competitive alliances and outsourcing agreements (with co-makers and external partners). Market-space competition also emphasises global economies of scale, whose value does not depend on the level of exploitation of elementary manufacturing factors but on the ‘intensity of sharing’ of specific resources in a networking system. In highly competitive markets, therefore, lasting corporate development does not depend primarily on the volumes of individual products (easily imitated in their tangible characteristics). In fact, corporate success on global markets is conditioned more by the level of sophistication of the intangible assets, developed, maintained and even modified, with targeted spending and investment plans.

Network organisations emphasise the importance of corporate and product intangible assets. In global competition, the managerial economics of intangibles imposes new network policies of corporate social responsibility, dominated by global social issues such as economic sustainability, eco-responsibility, worker protection and so on.

Intangibles are often become the most critical resources for businesses in global competitive markets. Thus, intangible assets and resources must be managed adopting specific strategies that determine costs with different patterns over time: expenses (with a short term span) and investments (with a medium to long term span) and with different underling explications (discretional and causal costs).

Over the last few years, large retailers offering financial services have considerably grown in the financial services sector. Retailers are increasing the wideness and complexity of their offer of financial services. Large retail companies provide financial services to their customers following different strategic ways. The provision of financial services in the retailers offer is implemented in several different ways related to the strategies, the structures and the degree of financial know-how of the large retailers involved.

Global markets redefine competition space, fostering a collaborative network between companies (market-driven management). Globalisation causes previously distinct global economies to converge into a single large market, thus generating fusion between competitive environments that are not only differentiated but also often very distant (competitive convergence).

The global motor fuel market is dominated by the oil companies (NOC – National Oil Companies and IOC – International Oil Companies) which control the raw material and manage stable alliances designed to monitor the various stages of the fuel supply chain. Where distribution is concerned, the large oil companies are being threatened by the expansion of large retailers which, particularly in certain European countries, now occupy important positions.

For large retail firms, management control is a valid tool with which to face the competition of global markets and to manage corporate complexity. The management control systems of global retailers have specific characteristics that stem from the geographical dispersion of their organisational units and frequently from the existence of cooperative alliances with other companies

Market-Driven Management is a corporate strategy that presupposes direct, continuous benchmarking with competitors, in a context of customer value management. Market-driven management therefore favours an ‘outside-in’ vision, based on: the identification of products with a higher value than that of the competition to provoke the intersection with demand (‘Before and Better than Competitors’). In global over-supplied markets, a firm’s success is conditioned rather by the intensity of the presence and by the level of sophistication of intangible corporate asset; in other words, the peculiar managerial capabilities that regard brand equity, information system and corporate culture.

The globalisation of the market generates unprecedented over-supply well in excess of the market potential. This oversupply thus becomes a structural factor of development. In open markets, global competition has set new rules (manufacturing delocalisation, global distribution players, competitive imitation, instable and non-loyal consumption) which have significantly scaled down the model of economic development based on the isolated small and medium sized enterprise without global networking relations. Instead they emphasise the importance of a robust national development policy based on the ‘identity of the industrial system’, in other words on precise ‘intangible macro-system factors’.

Market-Driven Management poses the question of the relationship between markets and competitive advantage. Market-driven firms reveal a superior ability to understand, attract and maintain, a supply of products/services that offer more value for the customer than competitors. The Resource-Based Theory originates from Penrose’s idea (1959) of the firm as a coordinated ‘bundle’ of resources that the business has at its disposal or has access to (inside out), which are valuable, rare and inimitable. In global markets, MDM strives towards continuous innovation processes that can enable the company to escape the potential pressure of the competition, by identifying new customer needs to satisfy (outside in). The market-driven company is not only oriented to the market, but also tends to orient the market.

Global markets endorse the principles of market-space competition, where competition space represents a factor of competition. Firms compete with one another in extensive markets, without geographical and administrative boundaries; they adopt highly flexible managerial directions, featuring the absolute predominance of intangible assets and aimed at exploiting global economies of scale, focused on dimension and relationship. Global markets redefine market-space competition and substantiate global managerial economics. The distinctive features of these are: asset management without physical or administrative limits; increasingly sophisticated products which are rapidly rendered obsolete because they are easily imitable at decreasing cost; competitive interrelations, developed between transnational networks, which go far beyond the multinational (or multidomestic). Globalisation changes corporate organisation and the role of strategic alliances, imposing collaborative network strategies on groups of firms with competitive relations; these then tend to form ‘closed’ relationships of cooperation to pursue a global vision in keeping with their huge corporate size.

The serious financial crisis that has hit the ‘Western’ world will generate longterm effects and the emergency measures adopted by the more responsible Governments to offset the credit paralysis (support to the mortgage market, public investment in key sectors, incentives to mass consumption, etc.) will take years (at least two to four) to produce positive consequences in the real economy of domestic and international markets. Globalisation and new competition boundaries thus force companies to adopt a new ‘philosophy of market-oriented competitive management’ (‘market-driven management’), which reformulates the traditional marketing management approach, introduced in the 1950s by Alfred P. Sloan of GM. In fact, marketing management presuppose an understanding of demand (and above all of its segments). With market-driven management on the other hand, market orientation helps to identify a temporary competition space, in ther works a ‘demand vacuum’, which must be maintained highly unstable, by constant innovative proposals. In global, over-supplied markets, where consumers are increasingly voluble and disloyal, market-driven management is very attractive because it favours: 1. activities focused on the profitability of competition, rather than on mere customer satisfaction; 2. market policies based on innovation and competitive pricing; 3. and finally, even very short-term performance metrics.