Territorial servitisation in Italian industrial districts: the role of technological and professional KIBS

Purpose: This paper aims to analyse to what extent Italian industrial districts (IDs), with their traditional manufacturing specialization, experimented a territorial servitisation process in terms of spread of specifically professional and technological knowledge-intensive business services’ activities over the period 2012–2018. 

Design/methodology/approach: This paper articulates knowledge-intensive business services activities in two types, technological knowledge-intensive business services and professional knowledge-intensive business services. It tracks their growth and their co-location with manufacturing sectors in Italian IDs by means of firm employment data and location quotients. Firm employment data is extracted from Statistical Archive of Active firms (ASIA) data set provided by Italian National Institute for Statistics (ISTAT). ASIA data is matched with ISTAT territorial identification of Italian local labour systems and IDs. 

Findings: In 2018, Italian IDs featured, next to their traditional over-specialisation in manufacturing activities, an under-specialisation in knowledge-intensive business services’ activities. Nevertheless, the dynamic analysis carried out over the period 2012–2018 shows that IDs firm employment in technological knowledge-intensive business services and professional knowledge-intensive business services grew at a higher rate than the national average. 

Originality/value: The novelty of this paper is to distinguish between technological knowledge-intensive business services and professional knowledge-intensive business services and to measure the presence and the growth of these two different types of knowledge-intensive business services in Italian IDs.