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This paper investigates the interaction between investment decisions, company foreclosure, and capital structure in the case of a constrained firm. We consider irreversible investments in R\&D projects with uncertain returns, financed through debt. Uncertainty comes from two different sources: the technological success of the project is probabilistic, and the return from investment evolves stochastically over time. These two elements, together with the lack of historical performance represent a substantial risk to the lenders, which will limit substantially the availability of loans. In our analysis, we first assume that the firm finances the R&D project through debt, and then, we further assume that the firm's debt capacity is limited to a certain amount. We show that leverage distorts the investment threshold and the shareholders of a levered firm accelerate investment with respect to an all equity financed firm. Moreover, when a firm is "financially constrained", it tends to overinvest compared to a non constrained levered firm. Thus, the financial constraint induces firms to play a "bird in the hand" investment strategy.

This study investigates whether the receipt of public R&D funding determines firm's R&D strategy selection. Using the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) dataset including more than 3000 Italian manufacturing companies, we adopt a multinomial logit model after controlling for sample selection and endogeneity issues which arise when dealing with CIS data. The main finding is that public R&D funding in uences whether firms select the make, the buy or the make&buy strategy and in particular firms, after receiving public support, prefer the composite strategy rather than the single strategies. This result turns out to be good news given that government support, correcting for the market failures which characterize the combined strategy, favors the strategy which seems to enhance a positive synergy between in house R&D and external sourcing.

This paper focuses on the relationship between firms’ innovative performance and different forms of academic cooperation for innovation, paying a specific attention to the role of Universities as sources of information. We build a dataset merging information drawn from two different surveys carried out by the Bank of Italy between 2007 and 2010. We show that the impact for firms of partnering with universities, in terms of the likelihood of producing a drastic innovation, is significant and increases as the level and quality of engagement increases. Thus, Universities may represent a privileged source of knowledge for firm. A tighter collaboration between firms and universities is associated with greater degree of novelty of innovation.

For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), R&D cooperation with sources of external knowledge is becoming increasingly essential for fostering innovation activities. This paper investigates the effects of collaboration on innovation by considering four different partner types: competitors, customers, suppliers, Universities and Government laboratories. Using firm-level data from the Community Innovation Survey for the years 2006-2008 (CIS 2008) and applying a Heckman probit model with sample selection, we analyse the determinants of cooperation and innovation probabilities for each type of partner. Results show that internal and external R&D acquisitions, public financial support, as well as belonging to a scientific sector or to a business group are significant determinants of the partners’choice for collaboration, although with different magnitude across various types of collaborations.

Il saggio si propone di esplicitare un modello di ibridazione tra aziende for profit e non profit, analizzando il processo di cambiamento generato dalla collaborazione tra le due classi di organizzazioni e le potenzialità delle partnership profit-non profit.

Lo sviluppo di imprese a forte impatto sociale e ambientale costituisce una leva fondamentale per lo sviluppo integrale per le aree più povere del pianeta.Dopo una classificazione dei vari modelli di social enterprise si analizzano le diverse iniziative poste in essere da istituzioni pubbliche, università e centri di ricerca e fondazioni per favorire il lancio e lo sviluppo di nuovi social business.