Title: Innovation within firms: a survey in the Piedmont area

Authors: Stefano Bresciani

Addresses: Faculty of Economics, University of Torino, Corso Unione Sovietica, 218 bis, 10134 Torino, Italy

Abstract: Innovation can be defined as anything new. It may be a completely novel idea, or a concept transferred from another field which has an exciting new application. In this sense, ideas, knowledge and innovation have always been fundamental to the economic transformation process of inputs and outputs. So, businesses are facing change like never before. Numerous driving forces to this change included a rapidly expanding marketplace (internationalisation/globalisation), and increasing competition, diversity among consumers, and availability to new forms of technology. It is almost impossible, in fact, to find an industry that is not engaged in continuous or periodic innovation due to the dynamic nature of market competition and globalisation, so that organisations try every day to anticipate increasingly dynamic and complex changes in the competitive scenario. The goal of this paper is to make a model which can classify organisations based on their level of innovation. Several variables will be chosen as measures of innovation. Then, we are going to apply the model to a panel of firms from the Piedmont area. As a result, we should be able to obtain an |Innovation Index| which will allow us to rank the firms from the |most innovative| to the |least innovative|.

Keywords: quality; innovation index; internationalisation; local development; Italy; firm classification.

DOI: 10.1504/IJQI.2010.034644

International Journal of Quality and Innovation, 2010 Vol.1 No.2, pp.138 - 152

Published online: 13 Aug 2010 *

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