1186 | 631 | Innovation as urban competitiveness driver. A measurement proposal: the Italian metropolitan cities case

Since the Industrial Revolution urban areas have been the absolute protagonists of human development and progress. What makes urban areas the pivot of growth is their ability to attract economic and human resources and then combine these elements to produce value. The planet’s resources, however, are limited and therefore challenged by urban areas to fuel their own development by increasing their competitiveness (van der Berg and Braun, 1999). Among the various factors of competitiveness, innovation, thanks to the new digital technologies, has assumed strategic importance (Castell, 1997; Garden and Martin, 2005; Sharma, 2017; Dameri and Cocchia, 2013; Michalik et al., 2022). It therefore becomes essential to analyse the phenomenon of innovation at the urban scale in order to understand whether innovation itself is a driver of competitiveness. To this end, this research intends to conduct a comparative study using the case of Italian metropolitan cities, NUTS level 3. It will therefore measure the level of innovation in urban areas through the application of a synthetic innovation index constructed with open-source data that takes into account the four macro-indicators that contribute to the territorial innovation process: 1) Human capital (Scaccabarozzi et al., 2022; Romanelli, 2022); 2) Business innovativeness (Bobek et al., 2023); 3) Role of universities (Kaloudis et al., 2019); 4) Digital infrastructure (Rukanova et al., 2023). The availability of data at the NUTS 3 level in the Italian context makes it possible to conduct this type of analysis, which is proposed as an attempt to approach the measurement and comparison of innovation and competitiveness in the territorial sphere, on a scale other than the regional one, prevalent in the most recent literature, but no longer sufficient to grasp the growing centrality of urban agglomerations in the evolution of economic, productive and social development processes.

Mattia De Martino
Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

ID Abstract: 631