Literature on eco-parks and eco-clusters has emphasized the opportunities for the coupling of local economic development and sustainability, going beyond firms’ green strategies to include also supply chains and local networks of firms. Studies have described the conditions and policies...

Italian district small and medium enterprises (SMEs) developed aggressive strategies to extend their sales networks and supply chains abroad. Literature on districts offered alternative explanations about the impacts of internationalization on local manufacturing systems. The authors consider...

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 paper reconsiders the key issue of the industrial district and the multinational enterprise as two alternative or complementary drivers of local development in the light of new empirical evidence. That evidence derives from the results of two surveys of the determinants of linkages between...

Italian industrial districts are no longer self-contained systems of small firms, where firms' competitiveness is the result of physical proximity and links with global economy are limited to export sales. A new generation of firms is taking the lead, reshaping the form of districts through...

Global economy is transforming the sources of the competitive advantages of firms, especially for firms embedded in local manufacturing systems. Based on the theoretical contributions to knowledge management and industrial districts, this paper describes alternative firm's strategies and...

The paper is oriented at improving the understanding of internationalization strategies of firms by applying the global value chain studies at the firm level, in the context of SMEs. An original contribution of our paper is to apply such theoretical approach to the Italian model of economic...

Purpose: This paper aims to explore if firms located in industrial districts (IDs) have different adoption paths concerning Industry 4.0 technologies and get different results with respect to other similar firms located outside IDs. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on a...