نوآوری در مناطق صنعتی: عامل مبتنی بر مدل شبیه سازی

Despite the wideness of the literature on industrial districts (IDs), the driving processes of ID innovation have not still received much attention: Questions about how new innovation processes emerge, how, when and where they evolve are minimally addressed in the literature. To address these questions new theoretical approaches and methodologies are needed. In the paper we approach this topic by adopting complexity science and by using the agent-based simulation methodology. In particular, an agent-based simulation is conducted to investigate how innovation processes in IDs have to be modified to assure their survival in a highly competitive environment.

Industrial districts (IDs) are geographically defined production systems, characterized by a large number of small and medium-sized firms that are involved at various phases in the production of a homogeneous product family. These firms are highly specialized in a few phases of the production process, and integrated through a complex network of inter-organizational relationships.1 The reasons underlying the ID competitiveness have been profoundly studied in the related literature by adopting different theoretical perspectives coming from many research streams, namely social sciences, regional economics, economic geography, political economy, and industrial organization. These studies have developed different notions and models, such as: the flexible specialization production model conceptualized by Piore and Sabel (1984); the localized external economies concept anticipated by Marshall (1920) and further formalized by Becattini (1987) and Krugman (1991); the industrial atmosphere notion conceived by Marshall (1919); and the innovative milieux notion developed by the GREMI (Aydalot and Keeble, 1988; Maillat et al., 1995). Each study emphasizes different and complementary aspects of IDs, yet most of them recognize the ID innovative capabilities as one of the major factors of their success. In particular, since Marshall (1920) developed the notion of industrial atmosphere, the inner property of IDs to easily transfer information, knowledge, and skills among firms has been identified as a critical success factor. It is widely recognized that such a property acts as a very powerful intangible factor for the ID competitiveness as it generates what it is known as the ID “widespread innovative capacity” (Bellandi, 1989). The notion of “milieux innovateur” (Maillat et al., 1995) underlines that the creation of successful technology IDs is mainly related to phenomena of dissemination and accumulation of the new knowledge favored by the firms’ proximity, both geographical and cultural.

This paper has addressed the topic of innovation in industrial districts (IDs), a specific production model characterized by the agglomeration of small- and medium-sized firms highly specialized in few production phases and integrated through a complex network of inter-firm relationships. IDs are not just an Italian phenomenon but similar local production models are widespread all over the world, see for example the geographical clusters in US, the milieux innovateur in France, and the Japanese clusters. Hence, the results of our study may broaden to other countries. Literature on IDs has widely emphasized the importance of innovation in generating competitive advantage for IDs. Most studies have investigated the ID innovative capabilities and their propensity to determine incremental innovations on both products and processes, by focusing on the main learning processes activated in IDs that are linked to ID specific organizational features. However, less attention has been devoted to analyze how IDs can improve their innovative capabilities to face the new competitive scenario. To fill this gap, we have formulated three research questions concerning (i) how ID firms should modify their innovation processes so as to survive in highly competitive environments, (ii) which learning processes should be introduced or, on the contrary, removed because no more advantageous, and (iii) how new emerging ID organizational features, i.e. the presence of leader firms, may affect ID innovative capabilities. To answer these three research questions we have studied innovation in IDs by adopting a theoretical approach based on complexity science and by using agent-based simulation. The complexity science approach has allowed us to analyze the system behavior as the spontaneous result of local interactions among heterogeneous and independent components. The agent-based simulation is a methodology coming from complexity science useful to investigate the system dynamics by adopting a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down direction.