Science and technology parks in Italy main featur

Authors: Danilo Liberati Marco Marinucci Giulia Martina Tanzi

Publish Date: 2015/03/07

Volume: 41, Issue: 4, Pages: 694-729

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Abstract

We analyse the results of a survey conducted by the Bank of Italy in the spring of 2012 on Italian science and technology parks First we describe the main features of science parks in Italy Then we investigate whether they have been effective in improving the economic performance and innovative capacity of the firms located within them We find a pronounced heterogeneity between science and technology parks whose cooperation with public research institutions is characterized by physical proximity Although the business situation of firms located in science and technology parks tends on average to be better than that of similar “nonpark” firms a differenceindifferences estimation shows that entering a science and technology park did not generally improve firms’ business performance and their propensity to innovate compared with external counterpartsWe wish to thank Raffaello Bronzini Matteo Bugamelli Luigi Cannari Guido De Blasio Alessandro Fabbrini Luigi Infante Francesca Lotti Giovanni Marin Andrea Orame Davide Revelli Francesco Venturini Giorgio Calcagnini Germana Giombini and the referees for their insightful comments and suggestions We are also grateful to the participants in the workshops on innovation held at the Bank of Italy 26–27 September 2012 and 19 March 2013 the DMQTE seminar at the Università “G d’Annunzio” of Pescara and the International Conference on Technology Transfer at the Università degli Studi “Carlo Bo” di Urbino We are also indebted to Luca Missori for his invaluable assistance in creating the questionnaire and collecting data and to our colleagues of the regional research offices for helping us in collecting the list of science parks The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Bank of ItalyThe authors ensures the quality and integrity of the research made and no conflict of interest can be related to the research made in this paper As already stated in the acknowledgements the opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Bank of Italy The usual disclaimers applyTo check the specialization of a SP we used the name of firms provided in our survey to get their information from CeBi/Cerved and Infocamere datasets For the purpose of this paper we look in particular at their economic sectors according to the ATECO 2007 classification which corresponds to ISIC rev4 and NACE rev 2We have been able to get the 2digit industry sectors of 548 firms out of 609 firms mentioned in the survey41 covering almost the 90  of the sample Knowing in which SP each firm is established then we were able to see which sectors and how many firmspersector are present in each SPTo detect the degree of specialization we then considered two variables The first one is the number of sectors existing in the park thanks to the presence of a firm the higher number the less specialized is the park However this variable can be misleading because a SP may have many sectors but almost all the firms operating in a particular one while another could have fewer sectors but firms more uniformly distributed along them Therefore we also calculated a concentration Herfindhal index for each SP according to the number firms per each sector existing in the SP

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