Public Interventions Supporting Innovation in Small and Medium-Size Firms. Successes or Failures? A Probit Analysis

WP 11/2008; The aim of this work is to investigate the probability of success or failure of public interventions, made to support the development of some Italian firms. The great number of small and medium-size enterprises, placed in the Canavese area, north of Turin, Italy, has suffered, in the nineties, of a gap in technological innovation in their production. The Consortium for the Canavese Technological District (CCTD), a public local association established in 1993 specifically to support the firms of the area, has supplied them with some technological, innovative services, sustaining their growth. More exactly, some research centres, named Centres of Competence, were created, with the pre-existing structures of the Polytechnic of Turin and of the firm RTM (placed in Vico Canavese, Province of Turin): their targets were to supply innovative services to the local firms and to place technical machineries at the disposal of the local units, to support their innovation and competitiveness. The present research analyzes a central point: which has been the impact of these services? Which is the probability that a public o private intervention to innovate has success and brings economic growth to the involved firms? This objective is achieved with a Probit Model, built on a panel of 103 firms, that covers a 6-year range (from 1999 to 2004) and contains their balance-sheets data and the technical information regarding their collaborations with the Centres; the results highlight the role of a solid patrimonial stability, of the choice of the right innovations to apply to the production processes as well as the importance of a high previous technological status of the involved enterprises

Evaluating the Effect of Public Subsidies on firm R&D activity: an Application to Italy Using the Community Innovation Survey

WP 09/2008; The aim of the paper is twofold: to verify a full policy failure of public support on private R&D effort, when in presence of a potential plurality of public incentives; to compare the most recent econometric methods used for the analysis of the input additionality. Compared to previous studies our work wants to trace out an advance in two directions: adding more robustness by comparing results from various econometric techniques and providing an analysis of the R&D policy effect behind the average results. A by-product of the paper is a taxonomy of the econometric methods used in the literature, according to the structure of the models, the type of dataset and the available policy information. We exploit the third wave of the Community Innovation Survey for Italy (1998-2000) with a sample size of 1,221 supported and 1,319 non-supported firms. Given the used type of data, the article presents two main limits: first, we do not know the level of the subsidy, so that we can control only for the presence of a total crowding-out; second, we can check only the short-run effect of the supporting policy, while an increase in the private R&D effort could be more likely in the medium term. Our results suggest that: 1. the main factors influencing the probability to participate to the incentive policy are R&D experience, human skills, liquidity constraints, but also foreign capital ownership; 2. on average, the total substitution of private funding by the public one is excluded for Italy as a whole, although some cases of total crowding-out are found: low knowledge intensive services, very small firms (10-19 employees) and the auto-vehicle industry. We get, on average, 885 additional thousand Euros of R&D expenditure per firm with a ratio equal to 4.62: it means that if a generic control unit does 1 thousand Euros of R&D expenditure a matched treated does 4.62 thousand Euros. The additionality for the R&D intensity is about 0.014 with a ratio of about 2.67

La responsabilité sociale, est-elle une variable influençant les performances d'entreprise?

WP 10/2008; In the last decades, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been deeply studied. Many researchers focused on the best social report form underlining advantages, and they shown that these documents follow more and more often balance-sheets. This work analyses the relation between the writing of social report and both with the profitability and with the technical efficiency. The outcomes suggest that Corporate Social Responsibility improves firm profitability and expands firm market share. Moreover, the relation between the writing of social report and technical efficiency shows that firms interested in Corporate Social Responsibility are also the most efficient, from a technical point of view

Best performance-best practice nelle imprese manifatturiere italiane

WP 08/2008; The aim of this working paper is to analyse the best practices of a sample of manufacturing firms that have carried out lasting best performance in terms of solvency, growth and profitability. Firstly, the paper analyses the factors that have favoured or hindered best performance, that is: size; ownership and corporate structure; product and production strategies; competitive and international position; human resources management; product and process development, and so on. Secondly, the paper analyses the correlation between size, qualitative and relational growth. By cluster analysis, three groups of firms have been defined with different levels of qualitative and relational contents. The clusters are the dependent variable of an ordered logit regression and the explanatory variables are the performance and structural variables. The research has been founded by the Piedmont Region and, consequently, is focused on the manufacturing companies located in this region

Italy's New Requirements for Academic Careers: The New Habilitation and its Worthiness

The new habilitation, established in Italy in 2010 and commenced in 2012, was designed (outcomes released commencing December 2013). Its aim is to filter who will be eligible to apply for competitions for the two permanent level professor positions in the universities. The results of the first set of data are 20 scientific sectors representing more than 10% of all sectors analyzed to understand if the outcomes reflected in a worthy way the indicators of productivity and quality of scientific production of candidates. Some legal and statistical framework are fostered before the data analysis in order to have a better understanding of the reform and the context where it operates. The hypothesis of the worthiness is here addressed on the assumption that the current position held by a candidate should not play any role in the attainment of the habilitation. Splitting candidates into two roles and having controlled for age as a variable, the data was used to reveal that the indicators of quality of scientific production (H index for hard sciences and articles in top ranked journals for social sciences and humanities) are more frequently the best predictors. Though some limits of the present analysis are faced and illustrated, some critical points of this new institution are discussed

Mustang Daily, October 6, 1998

Student newspaper of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/studentnewspaper/6337/thumbnail.jp

Logistica territoriale integrata. Il ruolo del Piemonte. Synthèse du Rapport Sectoriel

Quaderni d'Europa ; n.

Path-breaking directions of nanotechnology-based chemotherapy and molecular cancer therapy

WP 01/14; A fundamental question is how to detect likely successful anticancer treatments based on nanotechnology. We confront this question here by analyzing the trajectories of nanotechnologies applied to path-breaking cancer treatments, which endeavour to pinpoint ground-breaking and fruitful directions in nanomedicine. Results tend to show two main technological waves of cancer treatments by nanotechnology applications. The early technological wave in the early 2000s was embodied in some types of chemotherapy agents with a broad spectrum, while after 2006, the second technological wave appeared with new nano-technological applications in both chemotherapy agents and molecular target therapy. The present study shows new directions of nanotechnology-based chemotherapy and -molecular cancer therapy in new treatments for breast, lung, brain and colon cancers. A main finding of this study is the recognition that, since the late 2000s, the sharp increase of several technological trajectories of nanotechnologies and anticancer drugs seems to be driven by high rates of mortality of some types of cancers (e.g. pancreatic and brain ones) in order to find more effectiveness anticancer therapies that increase the survival of patients. The study here also shows that worldwide leader countries in these vital research fields and in particular the specialization of some countries in applications of nanotechnology to treat specific cancer (e.g. Switzerland in prostate cancer, Japan in colon, China in ovarian and Greece in pancreatic cancer). These ground-breaking technological trajectories are paving new directions in biomedicine and generating a revolution in clinical practice that may lead to more effective anticancer treatments in a not-too-distant futur

Atti del 4. Congresso nazionale delle società economiche : seconda sessione, gennaio 1903

- Relazioni #9- Resoconti stenografici delle discussioni #95- Indice #24