Organizzazione, innovazione e competitivitŕ nel sistema agro-alimentare: aspetti teorici ed implicazioni strategiche

Organization. Innovation and Competitiveness of the Agro-Food System: Theoretical Aspects amd Strategic Implications - This paper aims to identify which public strategies can be more effective in promoting the growth of agro-food production system’s organizational models tailored to foster innovation. It starts from the existence of a clear relation between the propensity to innovate and the competitiveness of the national firms. The theoretical framework that underlies the analysis explains the optimal level of coordination among food firms with the structure of the productive system and the characteristics of the technological regime such as the pervasivity, the sistematicity, the degree of newness, the appropriability, the cumulativeness and the basic knowledge. As a result of the analysis, it is shown the opportunity to favour the development of a structured network of food firms more than large Fordist firms. In this sense, the public incentives with a systemic approach the National Government has promoted in this last decade (such as supply-chain agreements, programmers for producer organizations, etc.) appear to be particularly useful to the scope. In the specific, we argue that a pol-icy promoting Technological Districts could be very promising to guide the development of the national agro-food system in the direction envisaged by the paper. JEL Code: Q13 Key words: organization, innovation, technological regime, technological district