395 research outputs found
The general profile of the outsourcing firm: evidence for a local production system of Emilia Romagna
No full textIn Chapter 8 Massimiliano Mazzanti, Sandro Montresor and Paolo Pini analyse theoretical correlations between outsourcing decisions and outsourcing variables, on the basis of a representative cross-sectional sample of firms of a local production system in Reggio Emilia (Italy). In this chapter the outsourcing firm is considered as a four-fold unit of analysis: that is, as an organizational, production, industrial and innovation unit. The authors point out that outsourcing firms of the sample tend to avoid The authors point out that outsourcing firms of the sample tend to avoid the danger of being locked into a low productivity growth trajectory because
of a myopic pursuit of a mere reduction of costs in the short run. Indeed, in the local production system the general profile of the outsourcing firms appears to be strategic rather than oriented to a short-run perspective, in the sense that tapping into the provider’s resources and competences to eventually promote technological innovation seems more relevant than searching for lower costs by contracting out
Financial constraints to investing in intangibles: Do innovative and non-innovative firms differ?
No full textThis paper investigates the extent to which financial constraints on investments in intangible
activities differ with respect to the kind of intangible and to the firms’ innovative status.
Through an original pseudo-panel extension of a recent European Innobarometer survey,
we are capable to address these research questions by attenuating the risks of reverse causality
and simultaneity bias and to obtain interesting new results. Financial barriers significantly
hamper the firms’ investments in intangibles with respect to R&D, design, software,
and organisation or business process improvements. With respect to branding and
reputation, and training, instead, financial constraints do not emerge to hinder the relative
investments. Furthermore, while innovative firms tend to invest more in intangibles, the
hampering role of financial barriers does not seem to differ between innovative and noninnovative
firms. Financial barriers reduce firms’ investments in intangibles selectively, but
the strength of this effect is the same in deterring and in restraining their possible innovative
use by non-innovative and innovative firms, respectively
Design centrality, design investments and innovation performance: an empirical analysis of European firms
No full textThis article provides new evidence on the relationship between design and innovation performance at thefirm level. In particular, we integrate previous analyses of the link between design investments and innov-ation by considering the extent to which firms put design at the center of their business activities.Moreover, we distinguish between the effect of design on innovation and its effect on the success of in-novation, as captured by firms’ innovative turnover. The use of the European Innobarometer survey, cov-ering a unique set of questions on the topic, allows us to test a set of hypotheses about these relationshipson a large sample of firms. The results show that a firm’s approach to design plays an important role inits propensity to innovate: the more central the role of design within a firm, the higher the likelihood itinnovates. The same holds true when considering the share of turnover from innovation. However, salesassociated with innovation do not increase linearly with design investments, as we find a positive effectonly for firms investing intensively in design. Overall it emerges that the centrality of design is stronglyassociated with firms’ innovation performance, while design investmentpersehasamorenuancedrole
Intangible investments and innovation propensity: Evidence from the Innobarometer 2013
No full textThis paper investigates the innovation impact of intangible investments. Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, we argue that through intangible investments, companies acquire knowledge assets that increase their innovativeness. However, a greater innovation impact is expected from investing more in technological intangibles rather than in intangibles overall, and a greater one from using internal versus external resources. Through a new survey on a large sample of firms in 36 countries, accounting for different intangibles and addressing their endogeneity through proper instruments, these hypotheses are partially confirmed. Developing intangibles internally is actually the most innovation-impacting aspect, but not in manufacturing. Instead, by controlling for this choice and for that of investing in technological intangibles, the intensity of intangible resources is significant for innovation in manufacturing only. Policy/strategic implications about the need of readdressing the boost to intangible investments for the sake of innovation in Europe are drawn accordingly
The pro-export effect of sub-national migration networks: New evidence from Spanish provinces
No full textWe investigate the effect that subnational networks of immigrants
and emigrants had on exports from Spanish provinces (NUTS3) over the period of 2007–2016 by integrating state-of-the-art advances in the gravity model
literature. In particular, we allow for heterogeneity in provincial export capacity, which significantly reduces pro-export effects, and select the Poisson
Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood as the most suitable estimator according to diagnostic tests. When both immigration and emigration are instrumented, the
pro-export effect of immigrants found by previous studies vanishes and that of
emigrants, instead, appears appreciable. The results we obtained suggest that
over the period that encompasses the double-deep crisis, immigrants did not
show significant information and enforcement effects in the considered context, while the effects of emigrant demand for home-country goods may have
been important. The prevalence of emigrant over immigrant effects appears
attributable to a change in the composition of the migration stocks over the
considered period of crisis
The production function of top R&D investors: Accounting for size and sector heterogeneity with quantile estimations
No full textAbstractThis paper aims at showing how quantile estimations can make the analysis of the firm's production function better able to deal with the innovation implications of production. In order to do this, we provide evidence of how top world 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 carry out a quantile estimation of an augmented Cobb–Douglas production function for a panel of more than 1000 companies, covering the 2002–2010 period. The results of the pooled sample are contrasted with those obtained from the estimates for different groups of economic sectors. Returns to scale are bounded by the size of the firm, but to an extent that decreases with the technological intensity of the sector. The output return of knowledge capital is the largest, irrespective of firm size, but in high-tech sectors only. Elsewhere, physical capital is the pivotal factor, although with size variations. The investigated firms also appear different in their technical progress: embodied in mid-high and low/mid-low tech sectors, and disembodied in high-tech sectors
Going beyond relatedness: regional diversification trajectories and Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) in Italian regions
No full textWe propose a new approach to regional diversification that, going beyond relatedness, investigates regions’ capacity to move along different diversification trajectories. By integrating evolutionary economic geography and transition studies, we focus on the patterns of regional diversification that emerge by retaining its place and path dependence and argue that local endowment of Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) has a role in their sequential unfolding for escaping lock-in situations. Combining patent and employment data for Italian NUTS-3 regions, we run a series of ordered logit models and find that regions with more KETs knowledge are actually better able to engage in unrelated diversification trajectories, but only when KETs are used by other local technologies
Review of "Innovation in Multinational Corporations in the Information Age: The Experience of the European ICT Industry" (2002), London, Edward Elgar", authored by Grazia Santangelo
No full text«Pay 1 and buy 3!» This might be the proper advert for a volume which frames together, in a coherent setting, three «hot» issues of the current economic debate: innovation – one of the most acclaimed engine of growth – Multinational Corporations
(MNCs) – the representative agent of the incumbent globalisation process – Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) – the technological system at the basis of the so called New Economy. «Non-European customers» should not been discourage from the «label»: the experience of the European ICT industry is explored
on the basis of general findings the author supplies for the largest world corporations.
The basic «ingredient» of the book is of «certified quality» too: the University of Reading database on 399 patents released by the USPTO (United States
Patent and Trademark Office) in as many as 56 technological sectors, the author allocates
to a variable, but still high number of corporate groups, in turn distributed
along 14 industries. The extended temporal span to which the database refers –
from 1965 to 1995 – the patent mapping to the corporate research location it includes
– either home-based or abroad-located – the geographical regionalisation it
has recently undertaken – in 77 regions at the NUTS 1 level, 206 at NUTS 2 and
301 at NUTS3 – and the integration the author carries out for it with the ARPA database
on Strategic Technological Partnerships, all identify an extraordinary powerful
«data-generator», whose details are structured in useful Appendixes. On the ba170
sis of it, several issues on the geographical dispersion and specialisation profiles of
the MNC innovative activity are investigated, both in general and with respect to the
ICT European sector in particular
Learning and firm dynamics: theoretical approaches and empirical analysis of dynamic capabilities
No full textThe aim of the paper is to investigate the relationships between learning and change at the firm level. In the learning economy, this relationship has become crucial for the firm, spurring an upsurge of interest in both its theoretical conceptualisation and empirical measurement. Faster technological change, shorter product life-cycles, more frequent job shifts and a lively firm demography have made learning - a flow kind of concept - rather than knowledge - a stock kind of concept - the key determinant of the economic success of the firm. Increasingly more, firm competitiveness and growth are dependent on innovation, whose successful development relies on the building-up of new competencies and skills, rather than on a large amount of economically useful knowledge.
How firms define their problem-solving strategies, shape their cognitive models and develop their organizational capabilities to learn has attracted the attention of several streams of research in organizational economics and in the economics of the firm. Either explicitly or implicitly, each of them addresses an aspect of what can be called the dynamic capabilities of the firm. Dynamic capabilities can in fact be seen as an important bridging concept between the firm learning and the firm dynamics
Resources, capabilities, competences and the theory of the firm
No full textThe aim of the paper is to point out some investigation lines which might result useful in building-up a theory of the firm based on its resources, capabilities and competences (RCC). While the focus on RCC has helped to address some limitations of the standard contractual paradigm, a positive RCC theory of the firm hesitates to take-off as its operationalization is still at an early stage. In order to move further towards this task, the paper suggests to: distinguish the nature of the problems of the contractual perspective which an alternative theory should solve (Section 2); identify those RCC features which are essential in connecting them to the core issues of the theory of the firm, that is, existence, boundaries and organization (Section 3); evaluate the implications of any hybridisation attempt between the two firm perspectives (Section 4). The paper then moves some exploratory steps along these research directions, providing some arguments about the
opportunity to pursue them further
- …
