Innovation Indicators at the Territorial Level

The aim of this work is contributing to the individuation of indicators of innovation whichbetter describe different territorial types of technological change. To this end, I have first of allassessed the advantages and limitations of the indicators most commonly used (mainly expenditurein r&d and patents). I have then moved on to analysing the territorial diffusion of otherforms of protection of intellectual property (pip): inventions, utility models, industrial designsand trade marks. In so doing, I obtained two interesting results. The first concerns the connectionbetween level of development and prevalent type of pip. In the most developed regionsin the Central-Northern area of the country we mostly find the patenting of inventions whoseshare increases over the total of the protection over time. Conversely, in the least developedSouthern regions we mainly find forms of protection linked to the modification and adaptationof products and processes. The second result concerns the territorial ipp distribution. In theCentral-Northern area there is a higher intensity of patents, while models and designs are moreuniformly distributed across the national territory. Trademarks seem to be effected by the presenceof large metropolitan areas, the availability of promotion services, advertising and marketing,to the effect that they are more territorially concentrated. In the final part I have put forwardtwo new indicators: research output and incremental innovation. These indicators aim atproviding a better distinction between upstream processes (research-invention) and downstreamones (modification-adaptation). Using few simple relations between these indicators and othermagnitudes, we have explored the possibility of enriching the descriptive picture by attemptingsome classifications of the regions in homogeneous groups. Overall, these initial exercises confirmthat it is possible to enrich the cognitive framework of the regional models of innovation,making it more complex and exhaustive, and thus better suited to inform industrial policies atthe territorial level.