Firms’ organisational capabilities and innovation generation: the case of Italy

This paper explores the relation between firms’ organisational capabilities and their engagement in different innovation processes based on generation or adoption. We place greater emphasis on the internal generation, as this should signal whether firms’ have put their own inventive and creative efforts in the development of the new products and processes introduced and, thus, the achievement of higher capabilities of innovating. We consider that, to increase their innovative capabilities, firms could introduce different organisational innovations aimed at improving the management of their internal and external activities. Besides this, we consider whether firms are organised in a business group as also this likely shapes their organisational capabilities, enabling them to better capture and take advantage of various group-level resources for the internal generation of new technologies. The empirical analysis carried out by using recent data from the Italian Community Innovation Survey shows that different organisational innovations are always beneficial, whatever the innovation process followed by firms: however, especially those related to firms’ internal activities facilitate innovation generation more than adoption. At least to some extent, even group affiliation contributes to increase firms’ innovative capabilities, regardless of the location of the mother firm.