Enrico Guzzini

Collaboration for innovation and project failure. A dynamic analysis

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to investigate the hypothesis that there is a complex and bidirectional relation between collaboration and failure in innovation projects. On the one hand, collaboration in innovative activities may increase the likelihood of project failure. At the same time, the failure in innovation projects may induce the firm to collaborate in order to overcome the problems that determined the failure of innovation projects (induced collaboration). Up to now, we are not aware about the existence of any empirical paper analysing the interaction between these two mechanisms. This paper aims at filling this gap by providing a motivation for the induced collaboration and testing its empirical relevance in a dynamic framework. The empirical analysis is carried out by using two consecutive German Community Innovation Surveys referring to the period 2006–2010. The empirical results support the hypothesis of a bidirectional causal relationship between collaboration and failure.

La ‘Smart Specialization Strategy’ delle regioni italiane e le relazioni fra ambiti tecnologici

La Smart Specialization Strategy richiede alle regioni di individuare le relazioni tra domini tecnologici all’interno della stessa regione (relatedness) e di indicare i potenziali collegamenti con domini di altre regioni (connectivity). Il presente lavoro, oltre a fornire un quadro degli ambiti di specializzazione individuati dalle regioni italiane, mostra che l’analisi della relatedness e della connectivity e stata in gran parte trascurata dalle regioni stesse. Tale sottovalutazione e, a nostro avviso, frutto della mancanza di una metodologia consolidata per rilevare la natura e l’intensita dei legami fra settori oltre che della carenza di dati e informazioni necessari all’analisi.

Aggregate Effects of Network Productivity Shocks

In this paper we study the relevance of links among firms in explaining the mean and the auto-correlation property of the aggregate total factor productivity rate of growth (Solow residual). Our approach relies on the interaction between idiosyncratic shocks of firms and the network structure of firms. We study analytically this phenomenon using the adjacency matrix of a complete network and we present a simulation with more general random adjacency matrices. We also check empirically, using Italian data, the relationship between the network structure and the Solow residual. In particular, in the empirical part, we find two main results: Firstly, the relationship between the Solow residual and the measure of connectivity of firms is positive, in accordance with the analytical results. Secondly, we find that the measure of connectivity is pro-cyclical with the annual growth rate of industrial production.