Periodically, every few months, we see in the media some high-ranking representative of industrial policy proclaiming the benefits of having in the country a national champion to act as leading player in the Aeronautics and Defence Industry sector.
We live in a context of supranational industrial partnership and collaboration.
As is often the case in all areas of life, and industry is no exception, this type of opinion prioritises quantity over quality. The focus is put on how important it is to have industrial autonomy without going into further detail, everything starts to become strategic and the names of the big companies in the sector start to ring out as candidates to lead the new champion. A few weeks later everything goes quiet again and so on until the next cycle without anything really materialising.
Of course, there is no doubt about the importance of have the technological capacity to be self-sufficient In certain areas, it is always a good example to cite that there are only a dozen or so countries in the world capable of designing, manufacturing and maintaining an aircraft but in an increasingly interdependent and globalised economy Perhaps it is not so much a time to focus on one's own capabilities and protect them from outside threat, but to look outwards and see how to complement them with the good that comes from outside. There is no doubt that we live in a context of partnership and industrial collaboration where the high costs required to develop large programmes lead to the formation of powerful supranational consortia capable of providing funding and taking risks that would be unthinkable for solo ventures.
Thinking more in the medium term, i.e. any temporal extension beyond a parliamentary term, it would seem wiser to focus on all those technologies in which national companies in any country have a leading international position and to focus the available resources to increase that knowledge in such a way that it is feasible for many of these companies to become segment leaders with a strong technological background rather than managers of large Programmes with a heavy administrative burden and little innovative edge.
Nor is it a question of re-emphasising that the real value contribution of the supply chain is not in manufacturing or assembly, but of making explicit that the real interest lies in taking advantage of the resources obtained from these activities that have a more or less established expiry date to reinvest them in efforts aimed at developing sensor fusion algorithms, in real-time decision support systems, in replacing fossil fuels with electric systems, in collaborative robotics or in any other segment that will enrich our networks. neuroindustrial.
