Suchergebnisse

Giacomo Becattini's thought has focused on the definition of industrial districts and their living mechanisms. However, he has also devoted some scholarly attention to (and put some practical efforts in) industrial and local development policies. After having discussed the central aspects of Becattini's thinking on industrial and local development policies, which should be system-based, light and complex, the paper focuses on the main legacy of this approach. Becattini's reflections on local development policies include many elements that somehow anticipate the current debate on system-based and place-based policies, which are discussed. Some evidences are also highlighted about potential system-based, light and complex policies in Italy.

The paper identifies different regional policy mixes, ranging from the more minimal to the more proactive or entrepreneurial and verifies their diffusion in the Italian regional enterprise and innovation policies. The empirical analysis is based on an original database containing every enterprise and innovation programme that has been implemented in Italy from 2007 to 2013, and is carried out by means of fuzzy-set clustering techniques. The results show the existence of remarkable heterogeneity, partly reflecting the well-known North-South divide, with some regions adopting minimal policy mixes and other regions adopting different types of proactive mixes.

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are understood as collaborative devices that can be used to achieve both efficiency and innovation. For this potential to be realized, however, some significant obstacles to effective collaboration must be overcome, such as the cognitive distance that often separates public and private agents. In order to deepen our understanding of the collaboration problem, this article assesses the size and characteristics of cognitive distance by looking at agents operating in the construction industry in Italy and Slovenia. Our analysis detects the presence of different types of cognitive distance in different socio-economic contexts, suggesting that cognitive distance is not simply the outcome of individual intentionality but also of social context. We argue that there is constructive room for policies supporting the efficiency and diffusion of PPPs that will facilitate the emergence of context-specific intermediaries to smooth the progress of collaborative work.

International audience ; Despite the presence of some antecedents, system-based policies enter very slowly the framework of Italian industrial policies. However, they spread rapidly under the impulse coming from the EU as enterprise and innovation policies. The article briefly reviews this diffusion process, illustrating that the latter generates policies having different labels and goals. Their future depends on many factors, including the beliefs and confidence in these instruments by policy makers and policy analysts. Before developing new policies in this field or adapting existing ones, effective tools are needed, which allow for a proper evaluation of past experiences.

An important, but under-researched, question in relation to policies funding networks of innovators is: what kind of innovation networks should be supported, if the policy objective is not just to sponsor successful innovation projects, but also to encourage the participants to form networks with desirable characteristics? Focusing on a set of policy programmes implemented by the regional government of Tuscany, in Italy, between 2002 and 2008, aimed at funding networks of collaborating organisations, we investigate whether the imposition of requirements on the composition of the networks that would be eligible for funding – in particular, the demand that networks should comply with minimum size and heterogeneity thresholds – influenced the participants' networking behaviour in the context of successive policy interventions. Our results show that these requirements immediately affected the size and composition of the project networks that applied for funding, although not always in the intended direction. However, these effects did not extend to the successive periods, when those requirements were no longer in force. This suggests that the imposition of policy requirements, per se, is unlikely to induce persistent changes in organizations' networking behaviour. Other approaches such as implementing outreach actions in order to encourage new organisations to participate in existing innovation networks and to form new ones, and additional measures designed to foster learning opportunities for the participants, might be more effective tools to influence the networking behaviour of participating organisations.

We investigate the relationship between language and trade, and we acknowledge language as both a code of communication and an important component of culture. We refer to the case of Italy where a large portion of export is related to the image of the "Made in Italy" (e.g., food of the Italian tradition, luxury cars, fashion clothes, etc.). In this context language is a means of conveying suggestions and symbols that become part of the goods themselves. Specifically, we study whether the presence of Italian as a migration language (proxied by the presence of migrants of Italian origin), Italian as a cultural language (proxied by the presence of students of Italian language), and proximity to the Italian language are associated with Italian exports. We implement a Poisson regression by pseudo-maximum likelihood on a database that includes 190 countries where Italy exports. Results show a positive association between Italian exports, including those of a conventionally defined core set of made in Italy sectors, with the presence of migrants of Italian origin and students in Italian cultural institutes. These findings are mainly driven by export towards high-income countries. The implications of these results for industrial policy are discussed.

AbstractWe discuss how public administrations have used crowdsourcing to find solutions to specific problems posed by the COVID‐19 pandemic, and to what extent crowdsourcing has been instrumental in promoting open innovation and service co‐creation. We propose a conceptual typology of crowdsourcing challenges based on the degree of their openness and collaboration with the crowd that they establish. Using empirical evidence collected in 2020 and 2021, we examine the extent to which these types have been used in practice. We discuss each type of crowdsourcing challenge identified and draw implications for public policy.

In several countries, governments have assigned to public innovation intermediaries (PIIs) the mandate to support the digital transition, by facilitating the development and adoption of new digital technologies on the part of firms and other organisations. This new mandate requires PIIs to upgrade their business models, moving beyond their traditional involvement in firms' technology upgrading and university-industry knowledge transfer, toward supporting the creation of new innovation systems around the emerging digital technologies. To understand how PIIs are reconfiguring their business models to support the digital transition, we study four cases of PIIs operating in the United Kingdom and France, whose mandates include providing support for firms and other organisations in the implementation of new digital technologies, focusing in particular on the Internet of Things (IoT). We show that, despite their differences, all four PIIs have substantially reconfigured their business models in similar ways in order to fulfil these mandates. Both the formal legitimacy arising from their policy mandate, and the knowledge resources and informal legitimacy they have developed, have played a decisive role in their ability to orchestrate the development of innovation systems around IoT.