The Technological Evolution of Industrial Districts

521 Pages·2003·20.148 MB·English

by  Giacomo Becattini (auth.), Fiorenza Belussi, Giorgio Gottardi, Enzo Rullani (eds.)

THE TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF
INDUSTRIAL DISTRICTS
Economics of Science, Technology and Innovation
VOLUME 29
Series Editors
Cristiano Antonelli, University of Torino, Italy
Bo Carlsson, Case Western Reserve University, U.S.A.
Editorial Board:
Steven Klepper, Carnegie Mellon University, U.S.A.
Richard Langlois, University of Connecticut, U.S.A.
J.S.Metcalfe, University of Manchester, UK.
David Mowery, University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.
Pascal Petit, CEPREMAP, France
Luc Soete, Maastricht University, The Netherlands
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
Economics of Science, Technology and Innovation
THE TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF
INDUSTRIAL DISTRICTS
edited by
Fiorenza Belussi
Giorgio Gottardi
Enzo Rullani
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSENESS MEDIA, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
The Technological Evolution of Industrial Districts /
editors, Fiorenza Belussi, Giorgio Gottardi, Enzo Rullani
ISBN 978-1-4613-5054-5 ISBN 978-1-4615-0393-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-0393-4
Copyright ®2003 by Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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work.
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Printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
List of Contributors vii
Preface ix
Part I: Towards a conceptualisation of the industrial 1
district model
From the industrial district to the districtualisation of
production activity: some considerations. . . ... .. . . .. .. . ... . . . . .. ... 3
G. Becattini
2 Local development in a post-Fordist growth regime...... ....... 19
P. Petit
3 The theory of geographical agglomeration -minimum
requirements and a knowledge-based suggestion...... ........... 35
P. Maskell
Part D: The generation and acquisition of knowledge: the 61
cognitive approach to the industrial district model
4 The Industrial District (ID) as a cognitive system.............. ... 63
E. Rullani
5 Why do let technologies and the Internet find it hard to spread
into industrial districts and favour knowledge exchange?.. .... 89
G. Gottardi
6 Cognitive models, efficiency, and discontinuities in the
evolution oflndustrial Districts and Local Production Systems 109
M. Lombardi
7 Knowledge creation and codification in Italian Industrial
Districts................................................................. 139
F. Belussi and L. Pilotti
8 Cognitive economies and the "nature of the district" ........... " 173
M. Turvani
9 Paths oflocallearning and change in vital industrial districts... 195
M. Bellandi
10 Social identity and identification processes: enriching the
theoretical tools to study Industrial Districts....................... 205
L. Biggiero and A. Sammarra
11 The industrial district and the "new" Italian economic
geography... ...... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...... ...... ... ...... ... ... ..... 233
F. Sforzi
vi The Technological Evolution ofI ndustrial Districts
12 Behavioural rules in industrial districts: loyalty, trust, and
reputation ............................................................... 245
M. Mistri and S. Solari
Part ITI: The new design of evolutionary industrial 269
districts: some case studies
13 Italian industrial districts: performance and evolution ............ 271
I. Paniccia
14 Is a district possible in the car industry? The case of the Turin
area ...................................................................... 313
R. Bianchi and A. Enrietti
15 The generation of contextual knowledge through
communication processes. The case of the packaging
machinery industry in the Bologna district.. ....................... 341
F. Belussi
16 The biomedical valley: structural, relational and cognitive
aspects .................................................................. 367
L. Biggiero and A. Sammarra
17 Sophia-Antipolis as a technopolis phenomenon: is myth
becoming reality? ...................................................... 389
M. Quere
18 An ecology based interpretation of district "complexification":
the Prato district evolution from 1946 to 1993 .................... 409
L. Lazzeretti and D. Storai
19 New forms of knowledge creation and diffusion in the
industrial district of the provinces of Matera- 435
Bari ....................................
V. Albino and G. Schiuma
20 The chair manufacturing district of Manzano: evolutionary
processes and the role of the institutions ........................... 463
R. Grandinetti
21 The role of academic spin-offs in connecting local knowledge 481
G. Capaldo, L. Iandoli, M. Raffa and G. Zollo
Index 497
List of Contributors
Vito Albino, Professor of Management and Engineering, Bari Polytechnic, Bari,
Italy.
Giacomo Becattini, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy, University of
Florence, Florence, Italy.
Marco Bellandi, Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Department of
Economic Science and Faculty of Economics, University of Florence, Florence,
Italy.
Fiorenza Belussi, Associate Professor of Economics and Management,
Department of Economics, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.
Ronny Bianchi, Research Fellow, CREI, Paris, France.
Lucio Biggiero, Associate Professor of Organisation, University of L' Aquila,
L' Aquila, Italy; Institute of Business Studies, LUISS Guido Carli University,
Rome, Italy.
Guido Capaldo, Associate Professor of Management and Engineering, DIEG,
University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy.
Aldo Enrietti, Associate Professor of Industrial Economics, Department of
Economics, University of Turin, Turin, Italy.
Giorgio Gottardi, Professor of Management and Engineering, University of
Padua, Padua, Italy.
Roberto Grandinetti, Professor of Marketing, University of Udine, Udine,
Italy; University of Padua, Padua, Italy.
Luca Iandoli, Research Fellow, DIEG, University of Naples Federico II,
Naples, Italy.
Luciana Lazzeretti, Professor of Economics and Marketing, Faculty of
Economics, University of Florence, Florence, Italy.
viii The Technological Evolution ofI ndustrial Districts
Mauro Lombardi, Associate Professor of Political Economy, Department of
Economics, University of Florence, Florence, Italy.
Peter Maskell, Professor, Centre for Economic and Business Research and
Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy (lVS), Frederiksberg;
Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Copenhagen, Denmark.
Maurizio Mistri, Associate Professor of Political Economy, Department of
Economics, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.
Ivana Paniccia, Research Fellow, Italian Agency for the Quality Control of
Public Services, Rome, Italy.
Pascal Petit, Director of Research, CEPREMAP/CNRS, Paris 75013, France.
Luciano Pilotti, Professor of Economics and Management, Faculty of Science
Policy, Department of Economics and Business, University of Milan, Milan,
Italy.
Michel Quere, Professor of Economics, CNRS-IDEFI, Sophia Antipolis, 06560
Valbonne, France.
Mario Raffa, Professor of Management and Engineering, DIEG, University of
Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy.
Enzo Rullani, Professor of Economics and Management, University of Venice,
Venice, Italy.
Alessia Sammarra, Research Fellow, Institute of Business Studies, LUISS
Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy.
Gianni Schiuma, Associate Professor of Management and Engineering, DAPIT,
University of Basilicata, Potenza, Italy; Cranfield School of Management,
Cranfield University, Bedford, England.
Fabio Sforzi, Associate Professor of Economic Geography, Faculty of
Economics, University of Turin, Turin, Italy.
Stefano Solari, Researcher in Political Economy, Faculty of Law, University of
Padua, Italy.
Dimitri Storai, Research Fellow, University of Florence, Florence, Italy.
Margherita Turvani, Associate Professor of Economic Policy, DP-IUA V
University of Venice, Venice, Italy.
Giuseppe Zollo, Professor of Management and Engineering, DIEG, University
of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy.
Preface
Fiorenza Belussi, Giorgio Gottardi, and Enzo Rullani
This volume collects some papers presented at the Vicenza conference "The
Future of Districts", held in June 1999, organised by the Department of
Technology and Management of Industrial Systems of the Faculty of
Engineering of Padua University, with the collaboration of several engineers,
industrial economists, and experts in the issue of technology management. This
was the starting point of a long-lasting and painful colIective discussion, the
results of which are documented here, during many meetings of this "itinerant"
group, including the workshop in Padua, organised by Professor Luciano Pilotti
and held in May 2001, "Systems, governance & knowledge within firm
networks" at the Department of Economics of the University of Padua, and the
recent international research seminar, held in May 2002, in Rome at the
Tagliacarne Institute, within the EU sponsored project "Industrial districts' re
location processes: identifying policies of EU enlargement West-East ID". The
reason we decided to organise this book was not only to underline the
importance of the industrial district (ID) model as a tool of propulsive local
growth in a country like Italy. On the contrary, the idea that moved us was the
theoretical dissatisfaction with the way in which the phenomenon of local
development and industrial clustering of specific industries was treated in the
international approach of the various disciplines.
To the roots of the Marshallian concept of clustering
If we disregard the determinism of neoclassical equilibrium, we become
aware of the real complexity of the economic processes which generate the
many possible patterns of evolution at local level. Our intent was thus to go back
x The Technological Evolution of Industial Districts
to the origin of such a fruitful discussion which started with Marshall, when he
tried to highlight the reasons that render the agglomeration of specialised
industries a territorial phenomenon worth analysing (Storper, 1997; Porter,
1998).
The term ID has been widely utilised in the economic literature for different
purposes .a nd within different theoretical frameworks. During the 1980s,
Becattini re-used the Marshallian concept of ID as a new unit of analysis for his
theorisation of industry-specific enterprises clustering in his theory - based on a
socio-economical approach - of industrial organisation (Becattini, 1987).
Subsequently, Porter (1989), starting from his interest in the combination of
competitive forces which give impetus, within the economic system, to specific
specialised clusters formed by inter-organisational networks (functional and/or
territorial), discovered the model of the industrial district that he called territorial
cluster (TC). However, the examples of territorial clusters he described in his
work were often mentioned by Becattini, the Italian economist who originally
studied them, as typical examples of IDs. Finally, the study of industrial
districts has been developed within a "geographical" approach by those
researchers who wanted to describe the empirical structure of local
agglomeration of specialised systems of production (in manufacturing and
services), providing an extensive classification of the variety of existing districts,
within a country or a region. Clearly when we shift from a theoretical concept to
its operationalisation, either with qualitative or quantitative research, using
empirical data, administrative database, and real variables, we encounter a lot of
difficulties in matching the theories and the survey results. So, the analysis of
spatial clustering has often resulted in an overproduction of concepts, where the
individual categories sometimes overlap, and are not mutually exclusive, or
where typologies are poorly described. For instance, in the Anglo-Saxon
tradition, the terms ID and cluster have often been used interchangeably. And
also among the more "Marshallian" researchers, like for instance Garofoli,
Camagni, Sforzi, Markusen, Paniccia, Guerrieri and Pietrobelli, and Viesti, we
encounter a kind of rich, and sometimes confusing, categorisation of terms like
industrial districts, clusters, industrial mileux, system areas, and local production
systems, many of which are extensively used as synonyms (Garofoli, 1991;
Camagni, 1993; Markusen, 1996; Viesti, 2000; Guerrieri and Pietrobelli, 2001).
To return, once again, to the Marshallian terminology, in the perspective
developed in this volume, we have focused our analysis around the process of
territorial agglomeration of specialised industry, where a specialised production
system is detachable and a district model could be identified. This means that we
did not take analytically into account all possible morphological manifestations