The Role of Innovations in the Competitive Strategies of Italian Agri-Food Enterprises

The aim of this work has been to inquire into possible connections between competitive strategies and inclination to innovation, through an analysis of a sample of Italian agri-food enterprises behaviours. Particularly, some firm’s innovation strategies have been analysed, inquiring into a set of characteristics that at a theoretical level are considered as potential factors of innovation adoption : economic and financial dimension, organizational structure, productive specialization, productive process and the location context. The results of the study have underlined the existence of a great variety of behaviours among the examined agri-food enterprises, which have revealed a highly varied inclination to innovation. The data indicate that the stimulus to innovation is the result of a set of factors that jointly act on the decisional nucleus of the enterprises. Moreover, the results point out that the processes of “organizational” innovation are gaining a more and more relevant role in Italian agri-food enterprises, while very strong elements of weakness seem to characterize the processes of technological innovation, above all because of a reduced inclination to both public and private investments in R&D