The paper compares the supply network strategies of ID (district firms) and non-ID (non-district firms) with a dual aim: to provide an overview of emerging strategies and to identify similarities and differences between business models. The quantitative analysis developed in the paper is based...

The fierce growth in global competition has led politicians and economists in Italy to shift the focus of the debate to the pressing need for the country’s small firms to formulate appropriate strategic responses. In particular, the discussion has prompted the question of how best to ensure...

Inventors and users of technology often enter into cooperative agreements for sharing their intellectual property in order to implement a standard or to avoid costly litigation. Over the past two decades, U.S. antitrust authorities have viewed pooling arrangements that integrate complementary,...

This paper addresses the problem of enabling innovation in firms through the strategic exploitation of both the technological changes that satisfy similar needs over time and the lag with which some user niches adopt newer solutions. Under given conditions, the market could see the emergence of...

The article examines three key aspects of the relationship between innovation and industry evolution: the analysis of the links among actors within a sectoral system view and the related research challenges; the modeling of industry evolution that takes into account the specificities of...

The paper analyzes a peculiar managerial practice, the delegation of decision authority to employees. The practice could enable firms to leverage the external knowledge developed by communities of users and developers. The work focuses on the interaction between firms doing business with...

Based on the framework of design-based comparative advantage, in which the dynamic fit between the organizational capabilities of manufacturing sites and the architectures of products and processes affects the competitiveness of the sites and industries, the paper describes and analyzes various...

In 2009, the growth and revenue performance of district firms in Italy deteriorated sharply. The effects of the 2009 crisis were evident also in terms of distribution performance as the gap between the best and worst-performing firms widened. Nevertheless, despite the difficult economic...

Even before the global crisis, the Italian economy was experiencing international difficulties, although the slow growth and declining share of world trade were accompanied by a perceptible process of manufacturing transformation. The paper uses data from the Bank of Italy’s survey of...

The aim of this study is to discuss the empirical literature which analyzes the relationship between firms heterogeneity and export activity on Italian manufacturing firm level data. We first present a short review of the main empirical techniques adopted in the applied literature and we briefly...