RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

Geography and sociology of innovation in Italy

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi di NAPOLI "Federico II" - SOCIOLOGIA - ()

Research Unit Leader

Fortunata Piselli

Description

The inquiry will be divided into two phases, each lasting a year. The first will concentrate upon the territorial aspect of innovation, the second upon organisational innovation contexts and actors.
The consistence and territorial spread of innovation processes in Italy will be analysed during the first stage of the research, using the requests for patents filed by Italian companies at the European Patent Office (EPO) as indicator. Patents are by now a consolidated indicator in the scientific literature that studies the innovative output of companies. The analytic potential of this indicator has been highlighted but its limits should not be neglected. Its main shortcoming concerns the ability to capture only "major innovations". In other words, it is less adequate to measure the type of incremental innovation widespread in traditional sectors or in small firms.
Our research focuses, nevertheless, precisely upon the innovative dynamics of greatest importance (see further on) and this is the reason for the decision to use the patent indicator for inventions protected on the European scale. One of the advantages of this instrument lies in the availability of homogeneous quantitative information about both the protagonists of innovation (companies and "inventors" responsible for the request for a patent) and the contents of the inventions. Therefore, it is possible to carry out a comparative analysis of different contexts through indicators that show "the patent request intensity" of a territory or a productive sector, constructed by considering the number of patents per population of reference.
The information relative to the demand for patents will be collected from the European Patent Office (EPO - http://ep.espacenet.com) database, using the provincial residence of requesting subjects as the criterion of territorial attribution. A more restricted group of companies will then be selected within this universe, consisting of those based on more innovative activities in the high tech manufacturing sectors. This sub-group will be the more specific target of our research.
To identify the high tech sectors we will use the Eurostat-OECD classification ("Classification of manufacturing activities by technological intensity and services for knowledge content"). This subdivides manufacturing activities into four classes, according to a decreasing order of technological intensity. The companies that enter the "high technological" activities sector will, therefore, be selected (the European Nace Rev. 1.1 classification codes follow in parentheses):
a) Construction of aircrafts and spacecrafts (35.3);
b) Manufacture of pharmaceutical, chemical and botanical products for medicinal uses (24.4);
c) Manufacture of machines for offices, laboratories and information systems (30);
d) Manufacture of radio-television apparatuses and apparatuses for communications (32);
e) Manufacture of medical apparatuses, precision apparatuses, optical instruments and watches (33).
The patents referring to this group sector then allow us to find the subgroup of the most innovative companies: those that have filed at least two/three requests over the last ten years. In this way it will be possible to identify the innovative centres present in our country and specify their characteristics. Once the provinces with the highest relative density of high technological innovative companies (from here on ATI companies) are identified, the socio-productive context of these territories will be analysed in order to identify their distinctive profiles. It will, for example, be interesting to test empirically the validity in Italy of the hypothesis formulated by Richard Florida that links economic growth to the consistency of the "creative class" present in the various territorial areas, i.e. to the percentage of workforce employed in the sectors that intensively use techno-scientific and/or artistic-cultural knowledge. In this sense it will be worthwhile evaluating carefully the thesis that associates the "3 T’s" of economic growth (technology, talent and tolerance) with urban contexts able to train and/or attract holders of "creative capital": cities distinguished by greater openness, diversity and tolerance.
In order to identify what are the most significant contextual dimensions for the development of innovative centres, it will be necessary to make use of an adequate battery of indicators at the provincial level, with particular reference:
f) to the urban and demographic context (population density, size of the provincial capital, aging of population, indicators of social cohesion/tension, etc.);
g) to the level of development and productive specialisation of the local economy (pro-capita income, sectoral specialisation measured by the Lq. coefficient, rate of employment in the "creative sectors", etc.);
h) as far as sectoral specialisation is concerned, special attention will be given to the thesis of "related variability" that associates the intensity of innovative activity to relative diversification – and therefore to the complementary character – of the productive sectors present at territorial level as an element facilitating cross-fertilisation;
i) to the amount of human capital (educational level of the population and the workforce, type of educational credentials, etc.);
j) to the amount of social capital as civic culture (percentage of associations and charities involved in providing social services at the local level, etc.);
k) to the amount of tangible and intangible collective goods (cultural, social and economic infrastructure, transport and logistic, business services, etc.);
l) to the activities of the universities, the institutions for the transfer of technology and public and private research centres (number of employees in research activities; R&S expenditure of companies and institutions; ISI publications and "Citation impact"; the patenting activity of the Universities; presence in the province of Incubators, Scientific and technological parks, Innovation Relay Centres, Industrial Liaison Offices, etc.);
m) to the amount of amenities (quality of life indices; goods and services for leisure activities; theatres, cinemas, cultural-recreational association, tourist activities and widespread image of the city).

In the second stage of the research the analytical focus will move from the socio-territorial variables to the organisational, personal and relational variables of the protagonists of innovation. The inquiry will concentrate on the one hand on the companies and entrepreneurs and, on the other, on the inventors.
The first stage of the second phase will consist of a survey of innovative firms. Having once again the universe of ATI companies as reference, a telephone poll will be carried out with the CATI (computer assisted telephone interviewing) method on a representative sample of the 1000 most innovative companies (at least 2/3 patents in the decade of reference) subdivided by quotas among the 4 great geo-economic areas of our Country: Northwest; Northeast; Centre; South. The survey will analyse various aspects:
a) education and professional experience of the entrepreneur/head director;
b) the company’s human capital;
c) size (turnover, number of employees);
d) economic performance (in terms of turnover, export, and employment);
e) market strategies;
f) organisational and financial structure ;
g) methods of work organisation;
h) relations with other companies and governance of relations with suppliers, users and partners;
i) research and development activities;
j) relations with research centres, universities, etc.

The aim of this analysis is to identify typical models of relations that link the organisational structures and choices, the social networks and the characteristics of the entrepreneur/manager with the economic and innovative performance of the ATI-company. In particular, with reference to the latter, we intend to test some hypotheses developed in the area of economic and organisational sociology that connect the innovative process, other than to the macro-institutional context, also to several characteristics of the companies and their organisational choices. Innovative capacity is associated, other than to a number of structural attributes (such as size, amount of human capital, expenditure on research and development), also to the presence of flexible and open methods of coordination, orientated toward "work by projects"; in other terms, to company structures that facilitate horizontal, informal communications and allow the development of learning networks among different actors (researchers, external consultants, project partners, users, suppliers, etc.).
In particular, studies conducted on organisational contexts that have facilitated the achievement of scientific and technological discoveries of great importance (in particular those of Rogers Hollingsworth) have emphasised the role: 1) of the presence within the same organisation of a variety of scientific and research competences or rather, highly specialised actors in different but contiguous sectors of specialisation; 2) a good standard of communication and social integration between scientists and specialists, frequent and intense interactions not only in areas of study and research but also in informal activities; 3) an organisational leadership endowed with both strategic vision in relation to the targets and capacity to guide and coordinate the different phases and dimensions of the innovative process (from the integration of the various work groups, to the financing of the project, to the recruitment of specialised personnel, etc.); 3) flexibility of the research team.

The second stage of the second phase of the inquiry will consist of a survey of the inventors. In this case the universe of reference consists of those responsible for the inventions for which the above-mentioned ATI-companies have requested a patent. All the requests for patents presented by the 1000 most innovative companies (selected through the number of patents in the ten years of reference of the inquiry) will be considered. The inventors – whose names are indicated on the patent forms – will be contacted by telephone and/or e-mail and invited to connect, through individual parameters (user name and password) to an Internet site specifically prepared for the inquiry, where they will be asked to fill in a questionnaire (CAWI method: computer assisted web interviewing). This technique of using on-line questionnaires has already been experimented with in the past and it seems particularly effective for interviews with "qualified testimonials", ensuring a good rate of response. his technique is particularly useful for figures such as inventors endowed with high technical-scientific competence and used to communicating on the web. The questionnaire will be used to test a number of hypotheses about these key figures in the innovation process, on one hand collecting information about the so-called variables of attribution (professional educational history, territorial and career mobility, motives, forms of socialising) and, on the other, relational variables (reconstructing the instrumental and expressive network, and the specific features of the networks involved in the innovation/discovery).

The final stage of the research will be based on in-depth case studies. This qualitative study will reconstruct a number of "exemplary histories". After having developed a typology of innovative processes – starting from the data collected from the surveys – the most significant 30 cases will be selected and 120 semi-structured interviews carried out with the protagonists of innovation to reconstruct in detail the generative mechanisms. Particular attention will be devoted to an in-depth study of the relational aspects, using the techniques of network analysis.

All the data collected in the second phase of the inquiry will also be used to test a number of hypotheses about the personal and relational dimensions of innovative processes that have been developed from the sociological and economic literature. For example, some of the classics of economic sociology (Simmel and Sombart) have emphasised the role of social and political marginality to explain the entrepreneurial and innovative propensity of a number of "marginalised" groups (Jews, foreigners, heretics). More recently, instead, the "new economic sociology" has drawn attention to the role of social networks, connecting innovation to two aspects of the social structure. On one hand, to the opening of the networks and the circulation of "non redundant" information through so-called "weak ties", and on the other hand the ability of some agents to fill the "structural holes" present in the networks (Burt) and connect unconnected resources and spheres of activities to each other (Granovetter). Some economic contributions (starting from Schumpeter’s pioneering work) or socio-psychological contributions (McClelland and various other successive authors) have instead attributed greater importance to a number of personal and motivational features: capacity for leadership and breaking with traditional routines; pleasure and creative capacity together with the need for achievement. Recently, Richard Florida has linked the inclination of the "creative class" toward certain life styles, to the choice of urban contexts characterised by wide social openness and tolerance for diversity. On the whole, these hypotheses offered by economic and sociological studies need to be tested in the contemporary processes of invention. The hypothesis we intend to explore calls into question the centrality of figures able to "introduce new combinations" of productive factors: a) favouring communications among previously unconnected spheres of activities and competence; b) integrating different but complementary resources (strong and weak ties; tacit knowledge and codified knowledge; internal and external assets).

All the coordinators of the local units have participated in drawing up the research project and then have contributed to its preparation, agreeing the division of the tasks among the various units. Periodical meeting of the coordinators will be held to favour integration among the local units in defining both the operational instruments of the research and to evaluate its state of development. In addition, unified training activities will be held to socialise all the researchers involved in the aims and the inquiry techniques. Finally, at the end of each of the two research phases, discussion seminars will be organised to evaluate together the results reached. We believe that close operational integration among the local units – in both the conception of the project and in its implementation – is a crucial factor for the success of the research. This model of coordination has already been experimented successfully in the past, since all the coordinators of the local units have already collaborated in previous projects co-financed by the Miur, and in other research activities

Taking into account the different capabilities present in the various research teams, the Naples unit will be mainly concerned with the analysis of the case studies.