Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on the labor productivity of firms in a specific local production system. A number of hypotheses about the location‐specific effects of outsourcing are put forward and tested on a sample of firms in the province of Reggio Emilia (within the Emilia‐Romagna region, in North‐East Italy). The relationship between outsourcing and productivity turns out positive only if considering the externalization of high value‐added activities. On the contrary, it is negative in the case of low value‐added activities. This occurs to a greater extent for firms in mature industrial districts, whose socio‐economic conditions however do not arrive to magnify the productivity premium of externalizing high value‐added ones. The technological innovativeness of the firms instead helps with that, pointing to a developmental use of outsourcing in the area.

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 participants into account, and to retain the inner complexity of their decisions, a Pseudo–NK model is built–up in which a population of firms is called to match a technological frontier. By evolving along different stages of the sector's life-cycle, such a kind of technological calls for a trade–off between two strategies of cost–reduction through either outsourcing or technological search. Overall, the simulation results confirm previous literature as, for example, in the introductory stage of the industry life–cycle, marked by frequent and intense jumps of the technological frontier, firms need to vertically integrate in order to have higher chances to win the competition for a new standard. On the contrary, in the decline stage, in which the technological frontier almost stabilizes, deverticalization allows firms to better compete on costs. These results change if suppliers are allowed to innovate, as they are more likely to lock the market in sub–optimal configurations.

This policy brief presents recent results on the impact that an open innovation mode has on European firms' environmental innovations. New evidence drawn from the CIS suggests that knowledge sourcing can increase the environmental innovation performance of firms. However, the way firms search for external knowledge and work to absorb it can lead them to different results, depending on whether they are involved in the adoption of an ecoinnovation or the extension of their ecoinnovation portfolio. Drawing on these results, policy implications for the European Research and Innovation Agenda are discussed.

This edited volume focusses on innovation-based regional change at the European level. The contributions deal with change in different European types of regions, innovation opportunities outside agglomerations, regional case studies from England, the Czech Republic and Portugal as well as with the additionality effects of an Italian regional funding programme. This thematic spectrum describes and explains various facets of regional change in Europe.