Dinamiche innovative e performance d’impresa: analisi cluster per un sistema industriale locale

Innovation, at the organizational level in particular, and social dialogue in the field of industrial rela-tions are commonly considered two crucial determinants of the competitiveness, productive efficiency and economic performance of the firm. The economic literature stresses how innovative processes cou-pled with social dialogue characterize firms with superior performances; furthermore, a functional linkage between the adoption of new organizational practices and economic performances is highlighted by some empirical studies. The present work shows some results of an empirical study on the innovation dynamics and economic performances of the firms of an Italian local system of production: the industrial system of Reggio Emilia in the Emilia-Romagna region. Rather than the identification of a causal linkage between innovations and economic performance at the firm level, the paper aims at supporting the existence of sta-tistically robust linkages between, on the one hand, innovation components, both technological and or-ganizational ones, and, on the other hand, firm economic outcomes. Cluster analysis is applied to a set of principal components drawn on four sets of variables concerning, respectively, innovation, industrial rela-tions, economic performances and firm structural characteristics. The study is based on firm micro-data extracted from datasets whose coverage and richness of information makes them unique in the research field for the Italian context