I live in Italy so I can tell about how OR is seen by Italian companies. As a PhD graduate in Innovation Engineering I have many colleagues working with OR problems of optimization in my department.
Some of their talk, is about how difficult it is to convince Italian companies to participate in projects of optimization for their production lines or the logistics.
The main reason is old mentality from business owners which don't believe in the ROI of investing a small amount for being more efficient. A left behind mind set that is keeping many Italian companies from exploiting their true potential.
The biggest part of the Italian companies are small - medium size and family-run businesses. So if the grandpa says he is not investing money for some “OR white collar guy” that will tell him how to do his job the whole family will follow his decision. The grandpa is the founder and still holds the largest part of the company so nobody can/will contradict him. He has always done the production in the same way and he is not going to change now. The whole situation can be summarized with the following picture :
However, that is chainging in the last years. Italian companies face fierce competition in the international arena in particular from Chinese, German and Japan companies. This leads them in investing more in technology and high-tech know-how.
Economic crysis at the end was a good thing for Italian companies becouse it filtered out the non-competitive ones which happened to be exactly the ones that did not belive in technological improvement and innovation.