This paper investigates the drivers of the environmental innovations (EI) introduced by firms in local production systems (LPS). The role of firm network relationships, agglomeration economies and internationalization strategies is analysed for a sample of 555 firms in the Emilia-Romagna region,...

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...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

The paper aims at investigating how the organization of a certain industry evolves once the competition among its firms, producing a 'com-plex' (i.e. non-modular) product, is modeled as the intertwining of innovative search and organizational change. In order to take the full roster of...

The paper aims to show how policy makers can stimulate firms' cooperation with research organisations in innovation. We argue that the administration of an R&D subsidy can be effective. Furthermore, this should be more so for extra-regional than intra-regional cooperation. The firms' propensity...

The paper aims at extending the analysis of the firm’s absorptive capacity (AC) by taking stock of its manifold nature. Innovation cooperation is recognised as one of its antecedents, along with R&D, but with different possible outcomes, depending on the kind of partner. Human capital is...

The paper investigates how top R&D investors differ in the production impact of their inputs and in their rate of technical change. We use the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard and perform a quantile estimation of an augmented Cobb-Douglass production function for a panel of more than...