The identifying of the areas mailnly oriented to innovation in the South of Italy

This work belongs to a wider research path that, starting from the study on the interrelation phenomena between technological innovation and land use (Beguinot and Cardarelli, 1992), is targeted to work out a procedure for determining the propension degree to innovation of a territorial system. The set up of this procedure can be a tool for directing and managing the evolution dynamics of a territorial system where an innovative process is going to take place. The adoption of a systemic-process approach (von Bertalanffy, 1951) led us to consider the subjects of the investigation as dynamically complex systems (Ruelle, 1992). As regards the above-mentioned target, the research work has been directed to a threefold goal: -determining the territorial characteristics playing a key role for the new technology diffusion; -defining the factors acting as propelling and innovating forces in the functional organization of territory; -estimating the state of the Italian Southern provinces as regard their propension to new technology diffusion. According to these goals, we divided the work into two phases. The first phase aims at working out a methodological hypothesis for defining the functional factors (success factors) and the physical elements (determining elements) representing the "characteristics" that favour the new technology diffusion within a general territorial context. The second phase represents a test directed to define the variables enablig us to estimate the innovative characteristics of a specific territorial system: the South of Italy. In particular, this phase aims at estimating the propension degree to new technology diffusion in each single province of the South of Italy, considered as territorial unit of reference. In other words, starting from the "success factors" and the "determining elements" , we identified a set of variables describing the status of the reference territorial system. Therefore we estimated these variables in all the provinces of the South of Italy and, finally, we worked out the data acquired through techniques of multivariate statistics. The knowledge of the characteristics of the settlement system of the South of Italy represents, besides, a fundamental condition for understanding completely the characteristics and the possibilities of development. This consideration urged us to place before the description of the different phases constituting this study a brief reading of the geographical-morphological features of this particular territorial system, which links its possibilities of development and success to its particular orographic structure and geographic position