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By using firm-level data provided by the fourth round of the (Italian) Community Innovation Survey (CIS 2012), this paper explores whether the implementation of specific changes in work organisation within a firm influences its innovation performance, not only directly, but also via reinforcing the link between human capital resources and innovation. The authors also analyse the overall effect of human capital and work organisation, which enables them to identify which combination of these variables leads to the highest level of firms’ technological capabilities. Main findings confirm that not only the acquisition of new skills through the hiring of qualified personnel, but also how personnel management affects individual employees on the work floor should be considered to the development of firms’ innovation capacity: indeed, work organisation as well as strong positive complementarities or synergy effects between human capital and work organisation have been found to give firms a clear competitive advantage vis à vis both non­innovating firms and firms unable to internally generate new products and processes (i.e. entirely or at least partly by themselves). These positive effects are present and relevant in both manufacturing and service firms, whilst a more differentiated impact has emerged between firms in high-tech and low-tech sectors of the economy. On the whole, the contribution raises some relevant issues about the Italian lack of innovation in work organisation, which requires particular attention by the human resources management of firms and the industrial policy of governments.

The aim of this work is contributing to the individuation of indicators of innovation whichbetter describe different territorial types of technological change. To this end, I have first of allassessed the advantages and limitations of the indicators most commonly used (mainly expenditurein r&d and patents). I have then moved on to analysing the territorial diffusion of otherforms of protection of intellectual property (pip): inventions, utility models, industrial designsand trade marks. In so doing, I obtained two interesting results. The first concerns the connectionbetween level of development and prevalent type of pip. In the most developed regionsin the Central-Northern area of the country we mostly find the patenting of inventions whoseshare increases over the total of the protection over time. Conversely, in the least developedSouthern regions we mainly find forms of protection linked to the modification and adaptationof products and processes. The second result concerns the territorial ipp distribution. In theCentral-Northern area there is a higher intensity of patents, while models and designs are moreuniformly distributed across the national territory. Trademarks seem to be effected by the presenceof large metropolitan areas, the availability of promotion services, advertising and marketing,to the effect that they are more territorially concentrated. In the final part I have put forwardtwo new indicators: research output and incremental innovation. These indicators aim atproviding a better distinction between upstream processes (research-invention) and downstreamones (modification-adaptation). Using few simple relations between these indicators and othermagnitudes, we have explored the possibility of enriching the descriptive picture by attemptingsome classifications of the regions in homogeneous groups. Overall, these initial exercises confirmthat it is possible to enrich the cognitive framework of the regional models of innovation,making it more complex and exhaustive, and thus better suited to inform industrial policies atthe territorial level.

The expenditure capacity in R&D is regarded as an important factor for the growth of modern economies. However, even more important is to understand the interaction between research resources and the single territories together with their concrete impact on innovation processes. In fact it is at the local level that the innovation dynamics based on implicit knowledge are generated and disseminated. In order to analyse these processes the present level of aggregation of R&D expenditure data is limited to administrative regions and is still high, this reducing the ability to carry out more precise investigations. The present paper makes an estimate of R&D expenditure for different institutional categories in Italian municipalities (University, Public Administration, and Business). The estimated database has been completed with economic variables referring to the individual municipalities. This has enabled us to carry out a correlation and a cluster analysis and identify groups of municipalities with different characteristics concerning innovation and local development.