The role of proximity in retrospective: organizations, ICT and human resources in Italian traditional districts? firms

The existence of strong complementarities between ICT diffusion, investment in human capital and organizational innovations has been recently stressed both by theoretical and empirical literature on industrial organization and economic growth. For many scholars, one of the reasons of the delay of Italian industries in addressing rising global competitiveness and improving productivity can be traced back to the inability to create the right environment for the synergetic coevolution of the three above-mentioned variables. This paper tests the hypothesis that the coevolution within the firm of the three variables, could have been influenced by the belonging of the firms to industrial districts? environments. In particular it controls whether firms which have made more use of proximity in their activity express retards or even ?lock-in? phenomena in organizational innovations with respect to the two other complementary variables. After discussing the issue of coevolution for the three variables and the role that district environments can play for the formation of phenomena of organizational inertia, we test the hypothesis of co-evolution between organisations, ICT, and human resources through a survey of 223 ?district? and ?non-district? Italian small firms.