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,...

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 investigates the main characteristics of the most relevant high-tech industrial districts (or clusters) located in the South of Italy and analyzes the public policies that aim to support their development. Section one, which draws on a wide survey to describe both the start-up process...

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...

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...

Explaining the productivity gap between Centre-Northern and Southern industry is still a central issue in the debate on the relative lag of Italian Mezzogiorno. In this investigation I use the unique UniCredit-Capitalia survey database on a stratified sample of Italian manufacturing firms for...