THE CONTRIBUTION OF CLUSTERS TO THE REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: THE CASE OF THE ITALIAN TECHNOLOGY AGRI-FOOD CLUSTER

The present paper aims at assessing the contribution of the Italian Technology Agri-food Cluster (CL.A.N.) in fostering scientific and technological collaborations between the Southern and the Central-Northern regions of Italy in the agri- food domain. The CL.A.N. is a network composed of the main agri-food players at national level, whose aim is to promote the sustainable growth of the sector by stimulating innovation along the whole value chain and optimising the results of scientific collaboration between companies, research centres, and institutions. To address our research question, we employed a Social Network Analysis (SNA) based upon the responses from two ad-hoc designed questionnaires that were administrated to the CL.A.N. actors located, respectively, in the Central-Northern and in the Southern regions of the country. Our findings allow a preliminary assessment about how the cross-regional collaborations among the agri-food key-players have changed due to the cluster establishment