The ‘Enterprise of Innovation’ in hard times: corporate culture and performance in Italian high-tech companies

This article deals with the strategies that Italian innovative manufacturing companies have deployed in recent years. Italy has, in fact, been hit particularly severely by the international crisis, which has induced a sharp decline in employment and a narrowing of the productive base. That said, we know very little about the strategies used by Italian entrepreneurs to cope with the economic downturn, especially the more innovative ones. To address this topic, the author has used a sample of over 400 Italian companies with European patents in the sectors of mechanical engineering and high technology (European Patent Office (EPO) companies), which were investigated by means of a panel survey: a longitudinal study carried out on the same companies at different times (2010 and 2012). The analysis conducted in this article has two main goals: (1) to describe the socio-economic and territorial characteristics of EPO companies and their strategies in the years of the crisis and (2) to examine the influence of a ‘collaborative corporate culture’ on company performance. What emerges from the research into EPO companies is the complementarity of resources useful for innovation and economic performance among (a) the internal and external relations of the organization; (b) the variety of knowledge and the cohesion of relationships and (c) the short and long networks of collaboration. In conclusion, successful company strategies are those which – thanks to a collaborative company culture – are able to exploit the ‘embedded complementarity of innovative resources’.