Search

The network contract was introduced by the policymaker to help Italian SMEs pursue competitiveness and innovation. As demonstrated by the previous editions of this National Observatory, the network contract has been a useful instrument to get positive results both at the network and firm level, but only if some conditions in terms of network management and organisation are met. The present chapter aims at describing the economic-financial results of networked firms, through the analysis of balance-sheet data of about 16,000 firms, from 2017 to 2021. The goal is to describe the Italian scenario to contribute to the understanding of the network contract phenomenon and to help the policymaker evaluate its results.

This chapter addresses the issue of open innovation applied to business networks to explore the impact that additional collaborations with partners outside the network have on the network’s innovation performance. The results of the empirical analysis show the relevance of the presence of external partners as sources of information and knowledge for innovation and thus suggest that a network contract needs an external network: the creation of networks that perform with respect to innovation requires both the presence of internal network contract members capable of contributing tangible and intangible resources to the network and the contract network’s ability to dialogue with a larger network of external partners.

In this work we analyze the performances of two of the most used word embeddings algorithms, skip-gram and continuous bag of words on Italian language. These algorithms have many hyper-parameter that have to be carefully tuned in order to obtain accurate word representation in vectorial space. We provide an accurate analysis and an evaluation, showing what are the best configuration of parameters for specific tasks., Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures

The paper uses Red Queen theory to examine imitative competition. We conceptualize imitative actions by focal firms and their rivals along two dimensions: imitation scope which describes the extent to which firms imitate their rivals’ technologies, and imitation speed, the pace at which they imitate technologies that have been adopted by their rivals. We argue that focal firm imitation scope and imitation speed drive performance, and focal firm performance drives imitation scope and speed decisions by rivals, which in turn influences imitation scope and speed of the focal firm. We also argue that the impact of this self-reinforcing Red Queen process on firms’ actions and performance, is contingent on levels of product technology heterogeneity - defined as the extent to which the industry has multiple designs and has high product variety. We derive hypotheses about the impact of imitation scope and speed on focal firm performance and rivals’ response, as well as hypotheses on the moderating impact of product technology heterogeneity. We use data from the UK mobile phone industry from 1997 to 2008 to test these hypotheses.