Spillover Effects in the Innovative Activity of Italian Start-ups: a Spatial Stochastic Frontier Approach

Start-ups play a fundamental role in countries’ economic growth since they stimulate inventiveness and market dynamics and in periods of deep transformations, it becomes even more important to understand what contributes to determining their survival in the market. In this framework, innovation is a key factor for favouring incumbent firms’ positive performance, survival and competitiveness. Besides internal investments in R&D activity and the presence of skilled and qualified personnel, also the external environment in which incumbent firms are located can represent a key source of new knowledge thanks to knowledge and learning spillovers occurring in innovative clusters. Therefore, in this paper, we evaluate the role of knowledge spillovers in affecting Italian start-ups efficiency level differentiating between spatial effects arising from intangible investments and firms’ patenting activity. Moreover, we also consider whether productivity and input spillovers occur across neighbouring start-ups. To achieve these goals, we use georeferenced firm- level data on Italian innovative start-ups in the period 2018-2020 and we estimate a spa- tial stochastic frontier model that allows considering different sources of spatial depend- ence. The results of the analysis can help policymakers design plans and policies aimed at favouring start-ups’ competitiveness by exploiting firms’ interaction and cooperation.