Franco Nardini

Research

   Rainer Andergassen, Franco Nardini and Massimo Ricottilli (ANR) will work on the dynamics of innovation  investment.   At the root of growth waves driven by innovation arrivals and then  prompted by imitation, lies the opportunity provided by increasing productivity resulting from technological progress. Researchers (ANR) will attempt to explain this occurrence  by modelling in-house activity performed by firms and fundamentally by examining firms' interaction in providing and spreading information. This interaction stems from the fact that firms' knowledge and know-how, more generally cognitive capabilities, are observable as spillovers are generated. In this sense, firms broadcast technologically relevant information. This fact straightforwardly holds when the imitation process is involved but even more importantly when and where a technological breakthrough occurs: a stochastic event that can be viewed as a Poisson arrival.  It has been observed that technological principles applied first in a specific sector spread to other sectors, some of them quite far removed in terms of actual product manufactured. This is a matter of cognitive interaction between heterogeneous firms that are nevertheless able to explore each other's technological capabilities. This interaction is clearly local in the sense that bounded rationality and limits to accessibility constrain firms to explore an informational space that spans on a relatively small neighbourhood. Interaction, however, is not a passive, effortless undertaking; rather, it requires the specific investment of mainly human resources. In the end, it also depends on the technological capabilities possessed by a firm that enables it to conduct an active searching process. Thus, investment in searching and learning leading to innovation  depends crucially on this capability. Future profits to be gained by successful innovators are seen to provide the incentive for innovative efforts and the model that is to be developed will relate the former with the latter. ANR expect results that will illustrate the dynamics of innovation waves, their average length and the mean waiting time between them. The analysis relies heavily on previous work (ANR, 2005,2006a,2006b), on self-organisation literature (Bak et alii, 1988 and 1993; Vespignani and Zapperi, 1998) and on innovation and imitation dynamics (Iwai, 2000).