Beyond the north-south divide. The geography of strategic alliances in Italy

Strategic alliances are considered to be a way for private sector firms to fill production gaps and to improve performance through collaboration with partners. The creation of such alliances is indeed shown to increase the competitiveness of firms in national and international frameworks. Recently, such alliances have also been seen as one response of small and medium enterprises to the global economic crisis. This study aims to analyse the dynamics of recent Italian strategic alliances of this type by using a recent database of 333 alliances involving 1,800 companies. The companies and their alliances have been classified according to attributes including specialisation (classified using NACE-REV nomenclature) and location (administrative region and province). The spatial distribution of strategic alliances was studied, taking into account factors such as technological intensity, geographical distribution of companies, and agglomeration factors and networks, at both provincial and regional levels uusing descriptive, correlative and multivariate statistics. We show that the effects of various factors vary spatially, and the descriptors of the spatial distribution of strategic alliances across Italy extend beyond the traditional north/south divide.