ABSTRACT
Innovation studies often deal with leading industrialized countries, corporations and sectors. They do not deal so often with late industrialized countries, technologically mature sectors and family fi rms. However, these are the dominant categories in which economic activity takes place in the world. This chapter is a contribution towards a better understanding of how innovation takes place in southern Europe, in medium and large capital-intensive fi rms highly characterized by technological transfer from abroad, where innovation takes place above all in services. It is also a contribution towards a better understanding of how personal networking within and among fi rms has been a key feature of the advance of the second technological revolution in Europe, as important as the creation of big modern corporations, as seems to have been the case also in the United States (Galambos 2005, 11-13).
