The Inox Valley: a knowledge-based reading of seven decades of industrial cluster evolution

This thesis analyzes the evolution of the Inox Valley, an industrial cluster in North-Eastern Italy specializing in stainless steel processing and professional food service equipment, through three interlocking theoretical lenses: Mokyr's useful knowledge framework, which distinguishes between propositional knowledge (Omega) and prescriptive knowledge (lambda); Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction; and the Economic Complexity framework of Hausmann and Hidalgo. The research traces four phases of cluster development — from its industrial genesis in the 1950s and 1960s, driven by anchor firms Zoppas and Zanussi, through the crisis and consolidation of the 1970s and 1980s, the maturation of the professional food service segment in the 1990s and 2000s, to the contemporary challenges of digital transition and sustainability. The analysis shows that the cluster's competitive advantage is grounded in the depth and social embeddedness of its prescriptive knowledge base, accumulated through decades of spin-off entrepreneurship, labour mobility, and informal inter-firm exchange. A comparative analysis with the Shunde appliance cluster in China's Pearl River Delta reveals that this distributed knowledge architecture is simultaneously the cluster's most difficult-to-replicate asset and its most urgent institutional vulnerability. The central conclusion is that the Inox Valley is best understood as a dynamic knowledge system whose resilience depends on its capacity to maintain low access costs to externally generated propositional knowledge and to convert it into locally embedded prescriptive capabilities — a capacity that is currently under structural strain from the human capital dynamics of the Veneto region.