The role of innovations in the competitive strategies of Italian agri-food entreprises

The paper aims to inquire into possible connections between competitive strategies and inclination to innovation, analyzing the behavior of a sample of Italian agri-food enterprises. Firm's innovation strategies have been related to a set of characteristics that are considered as potential factors of innovation at a theoretical level: economic and financial dimension, organizational structure, productive specialization, productive process and location context. 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 organizational innovations are gaining a more and more relevant role in the Italian agri-food sector, 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.