RICERCA ITALIANA     

Geography and sociology of innovation in Italy

Università degli Studi di Firenze

Abstract

Innovation is a key resource for the development of advanced economies in the new scenarios of globalisation. The competition of countries with low labour costs forces firms in the most industrialised areas to give up a strategy of competition based exclusively upon prices. The process, however, is less linear than generally thought. Italy, for example, is particularly lagging in this process.
However, in spite of the strong specialisation in the more traditional sectors , there are firms and regions based on the knowledge economy. The role of the institutions in the construction of these “territorial vocations” is decisive, given the tendency for the most innovative companies to concentrate where they can make use of particularly valuable external economies. The literature about high tech districts and innovation systems has provided convincing explanations about these phenomena of agglomeration, clearly highlighting two aspects.
a) The first is that technological innovation is based upon processes of interaction that involve a plurality of actors and institutions (economic and non-economic). The dynamics of innovation relies on a complex set of relations that join firms together (forms of collaboration in the design and production, subcontracting, and exchange of information and experiences) just as it brings together firms and university and research institutions, institutions specialising in financing innovation, local governments, foundations, etc.
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Principal Investigator

Carlo Trigilia Università degli Studi di FIRENZE

Research Objectives

Innovation is a key resource for the development of advanced economies in the new scenarios of globalisation. The competition of countries with low labour costs forces firms in the most industrialised areas to give up a strategy of competition based exclusively upon prices. The process, however, is less linear than generally thought. Italy, for example, is particularly lagging in this process.

The delay clearly emerge from the data of the European Innovation Scoreboard. This instrument, developed by the European Commission to monitor the results of the “Lisbon strategy” annually, is based upon a set of 26 indicators that measure different aspects of the performance of “national systems of research and innovation”: a) innovation inputs; b) outputs; c) overall performance.
Italy is in 20th position (in 25-nation Europe) on the input side (graduates in scientific subjects, expenditure on R&S etc.), in 13th position in output (occupation and exportation in the high tech sectors; product innovations; etc.). Then in 15th position in the overall ranking (0.36), below the European average (0.42) and at a notable distance from the most advanced countries. Far not only from the United States (0.60) and Japan (0.65) but also from the group of the 5 leading European countries: Sweden (0.72); Switzerland (0.71); Finland (0.68); Denmark (0.60); Germany (0.58).
In spite of the strong specialisation in the more traditional sectors , in Italy there are >>>

First Results

Research on innovation in Italy - especially in the field of high tech - has been mainly based on econometric models. These studies aim at evaluating the connection of patents to particular features of firms and territorial settings. A sociological approach that analyses innovation in high tech sectors as a social construction is lacking. But it seems important to link macro and micro levels together, and therefore to study the territorial spread and the agglomeration of innovative phenomena, connecting the features of firms and territories with the action of the “actors of innovation” (entrepreneurs and inventors). The research project, therefore, intends to make a contribution on these themes drawing on both the sociological and economic literature.

Summarising briefly what has already been illustrated in the previous sections, the hypothesis from which the research starts is that the growth of more innovative activities and services depends very much today on the capacity for the social construction of innovation. This process is influenced by the collective goods available at local level that increase external economies, especially in the field of the generation of new knowledge. The contemporary economy is increasingly more relational: it is more open to non-market factors, less governable with only contractual relations. It depends more upon conditions of local context that facilitate cooperation between individual and collective actors. Innovation and >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The social and relational dimensions of innovation in the contemporary economy tend to become increasingly more important vis-à-vis the firm dimension, This means that the local roots of the innovative processes also increase. Innovation is not only the most effective solution to a given problem but rather the discovery of new problems. It does not concern the best way of travelling along a well-known road, but it rather involves the capacity of discovering new roads. In this sense innovation has a fundamental interpretive and dialogical component concerning effective interactions or “conversations” - as Lester and Piore have called them recently - between several actors with different experiences. This process foster learning and promote new discoveries. But effective conversations need an informal and direct interaction component that calls the territory into question.
True that there was social construction of innovation in the past, also in the social and productive settings dominated by Fordism, but it was linked more to the world of large corporations than territories, precisely because the vertically integrated company was by its very nature more autonomous from the environmental context. It dominated the environment rather than being its tributary. Things changed in the final decades of the twentieth century. Fordist innovations had time. They could rely on long time of introduction and diffusion. The post-Ford world is different. Markets have become >>>