Reti di cooperazione e innovazione

The reflections that have driven the research work proposed in this volume take the moves from theoretical questions that are intertwined in an intense confrontation with regional administrators, managers of service centers, researchers working on issues of technology transfer and innovation. The analytical work has allowed us to identify the conditions for fostering generative relationships and scaffolding structure (support structures) effective in supporting innovation processes in systems of small and medium enterprises. A coherent set of policies for innovation must address issues arising at different time scales and at different levels of political and social organization (municipalities, regions, individual countries to the European Union) and must be able to identify, for each level, the agents on which a lever to stimulate and support innovation. What tools do we have to identify these agents, and to monitor and evaluate the processes of innovation and not only innovations and their effects? In the essays in this volume innovation is seen as a social process characterized by interactions among heterogeneous agents. Interactions involving many aspects (cognitive, social, technological, economic and political) that develop over weeks, or sometimes for decades, and which take place in many locations (from universities to industrial research centers both public and private, from regulatory agencies to trade associations, professional orders, to the organization of the markets). Each interaction process, in each of these locations, it can create "bottlenecks" that prevent the creation or the emergence of innovations. If we consider the interaction a key element of the innovation process, then we need to explore in more depth what are the relevant ones and in what contexts (think of the system of education and training, the university system, the public research system and that of private research, financial institutions, under the conditions laid down by law governing exchanges between the actors and intellectual property). We must also ask what types of organizations, and under what activities are involved in the process innovative. Where interactions between agents are not generating desired results in terms of innovation, such tools can change the structure of the interactions? With reference to the systems of small and medium enterprises, the contributions collected in the volume identify some answers to these questions and deepen the analysis of their implications for innovation policy. Two axes of reasoning will guide the reading: the theories of innovation, in the first part of the volume, reflections on policies to support innovation, in the second part