From Railways to Aircraft: Officine Meccaniche Reggiane’s Successful Product Transition in the 1930s

In 1936 Gianni Caproni, one of the biggest aircraft producers in Italy, bought one of the biggest engineering companies in Emilia Romagna, the Officine Meccaniche Reggiane, and started manufacturing and exporting some of the topmost fighters ever produced in Italy. Based on different archival sources this paper would like to shed light on why, despite a national technological obsolescence in the field a company, which focused on the production of railway material, was able to come up with the most technologically innovative fighters (the Re. 2000 and successive models) which soon conquered the Italian and foreign markets. The author would like to indicate the original characteristics which help explain its primacy: the unique features of the Reggiane, the role of the new owner, risk-taker and forward-looking entrepreneur Gianni Caproni and in particular the importance of the transmission of knowledge, which in those autarchic years and in this particular case was reached by attracting human capital from abroad. The general argumentation of the paper would like to show the importance of deeply excavating in the company’s history, managerial choices, risk-taking attitudes, and knowledge transfer in explaining an otherwise almost inexplicable international business success in a such a competitive sector. The approach is not purely descriptive: the paper analyses the facts and figures of the Officine Meccaniche Reggiane before and after the Caproni takeover, it evaluates the company’s innovative production strategy in the new field of aircraft production and offers new interpretations on its success story in this field.