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The aim of the paper is to point out some investigation lines which might result useful in building‐up a theory of the firm based on its resources, capabilities and competences (RCC). While the focus on RCC has helped to address some limitations of the standard contractual paradigm, a positive RCC theory of the firm hesitates to take‐off as its operationalization is still at an early stage. In order to move further towards this task, the paper suggests to: distinguish the nature of the problems of the contractual perspective which an alternative theory should solve (Section 2); identify those RCC features which are essential in connecting them to the core issues of the theory of the firm, that is, existence, boundaries and organization (Section 3); evaluate the implications of any hybridisation attempt between the two firm perspectives (Section 4). The paper then moves some exploratory steps along these research directions, providing some arguments about the opportunity to pursue them further.

This paper adopts a "geography of innovation" approach to test for France the hypothesis that patent activity within each administrative region is related to corporate expenditures in R&D in that territory, as well as research expenditures undertaken in universities located in the same area. It emerges that French manufacturing firms (both private and state-owned) benefit significantly from knowledge produced within the geographical area in which they are located, although the coefficient estimated for the university R&D variable is equally significant but higher than that for the industry R&D one. At the reginal level, university research therefore turns out to be the most crucial source of knowledge spillovers for the innovative activities of manufacturing firms.

This paper investigates the innovation impact of intangibles by considering the decision of firms to invest in a comprehensive set of them. By using a new survey on a large sample of firms in 28 EU (plus 8 non-EU) countries, we first identify the principal components of the resources firms invest in six kinds of intangibles. Their contribution to the firms' propensity to introduce new products and/or processes is then estimated with a two-step model, which addresses the endogeneity of the focal regressors through theoretically consistent instruments. A firm's innovativeness depends on its choice of using internal vs. external resources for its intangible investments more than on their actual amount, and on the kind of assets these investments are directed to. Intangibles need to be managed strategically in order to have an innovation impact and the policy support of this type of investment must take this strategic use into account.

The aim of this paper is to study the automobile industry of the most important European countries (France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy) from a sectoral, system perspective. The main relationships within and between the building blocks constituting the automobile technological system are mapped and evaluated, both in cross-sectional and in temporal terms. The importance of the sectoral TS as the unit of our analysis appears evident at both levels. Some general sectoral properties emerge, which however hold in the four countries to a di erent extent, thus suggesting how the institutional set-up works as a di erentiating element. A sustained process of change in the various elements of the automobile TS is detected, nevertheless resulting in a relatively stable path of development. The countries considered reveal di erent patterns of motor vehicles trade specialisation in di erent geographical areas, with changes over time. Also foreign direct investments show the existence of very di erent trajectories and outward/inward balances.

The paper aims at addressing some methodological issues in applying Social Network Analysis indicators to the investigation of nation-wide intersectoral innovation ows matrices. The majority of SNA techniques require dichotomization of the original matrices and suitable relativization procedures, in order to avoid size-biases. The relativization procedures used so far suffer from some limitations, as they either alter the meaning of SNA indicators or do not take into account the composition of countries' final demand. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose two new different methods and compare them with the existing ones on the basis of their rationale. Rather than with respect to a single cut-off, the comparison is carried out by working out SNA indicators distributions. An illustrative application is carried out by comparing the technological systems of six structurally different OECD countries in the mid-'90s. In so doing, the robustness of their conventional innovation ranking is tested and discussed.

The diffusion of outsourcing, both national and international, and vertical FDIs among manufacturing firms, along with the higher integra- tion of business services in manufacturing, has recently led to question the empirical evidence supporting the Deindustrialisation/Tertiarisation (DT) hypothesis. Rather than a \real" phenomenon, it has been argued, DT would be an \apparent" one, mainly due to the reorganization of production across national and sectoral boundaries. The empirical studies that have dealt with the topic so far have not been able to effectively rule out such possibility, because of two main limitations: the sectoral level of the analysis and/or the national focus. In order to overcome them, the paper carries out an appreciative investigation of the actual extent of the DT occurred in the OECD area over the '80s and the '90s by moving from a sector to a subsystem perspective, thus retaining both direct and indirect relations, and by referring to a \pseudo-World" of 7 OECD countries, thus taking into account the \global" dimension of the phenomenon. The results strongly support the DT hypothesis: although the weight of business sector services in the manufacturing subsystem increased, acting as a counterbalancing tendency to the manufacturing decline, subsystem shares significantly decreased, thus confirming DT as a more fundamental trend of modern economies.

The paper aims at investigating the structural change implications of outsourcing. In trying to bridge the organizational/industrial and the sectoral/structural analysis of outsourcing, it discusses the rational and the methodological pros and cons of a "battery" of outsourcing measurements for structural change analysis. Their functioning is then illustrated through a concise application of them to the OECD area over the '80s and the early '90s. A combined used of them emerges as recommendable in checking for the role of outsourcing with respect to that of other structural change determinants.