Research-Firms Collaboration in Italy and Germany: Analysis and Industrial Policy Implications for the Italian NRRP

Research-firms collaboration is a topic that, in Italy, has historically been targeted by industrial policy interventions, and recently by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (nrrp).This paper analyses and compares of the main measures supporting research-firms collaboration in Italy and Germany. This is to understand any possible mistakes made in the past in our country with respect to the deployment of measures to support technology transfer, while drawing useful insights from the German case.For the case of Italy, the analysis highlights that numerous infrastructures, both physical and virtual, have been put in place over the past decades with the task of facilitating the interactions between the productive and the research systems: however (and conversely to what emerges from the German case), the same effort hasn’t been done for the creation and organization of a non-academic labor market which has to be considered a pivotal and complementary channel to infrastructures-building. Based on the evidence collected, the paper advances some industrial policy implications, wishing that the critical issues of the past will not arise also for the emerging initiatives envisaged by the nrrp, although, at first glance, the nrrp does not appear to actually overcome them