45070 - Corporate and Innovation Economics

Learning outcomes

The aim of the course is to provide students with the theoretical and empirical analysis tools necessary to address the main issues related to the birth, boundaries and organisation of the firm. Special attention will be paid to technological innovation processes, their generation, their management, and their impact on the economic system. Of particular relevance is the institutional infrastructure required to correct the market failure that innovative activity, by definition, implies.

At the end of the course, students will have acquired an adequate knowledge of firms, understood both as an economic institution, governed through contracts characterised by information asymmetry and contractual incompleteness, and as a set of resources and competences interconnected by organisational routines that guide its behaviour and dynamics. Furthermore, they will have acquired the basic knowledge to understand the ways in which technological innovation impacts on the economic system, and the functioning of the institutional infrastructure to ease its generative and diffusive processes.

Course contents

The teaching programme includes a first part in which the main characteristics of the process of birth and growth of enterprises are outlined, through the analysis of the variety of organisational structures, and of the ways in which enterprises decide their innovative strategies. Through a critical review of the different theories of the firm, the main factors explaining the existence of firms their boundaries and their organisational structure will be analysed. In particular, the different organisational forms are the result of the interaction between the market and different institutional contexts.

In the second part, the determinants and modalities of firms' innovative activity will be analysed. The most important theories, the relationship between technical progress and economic development, and the ways in which innovation is diffused within economic systems will be presented. Enterprises reorganise the production process through remodelling the division of labour, which also leads to (sometimes extreme) forms of outsourcing of production segments. Finally, it will be analysed how different institutional contexts can determine different, albeit congruent, development paths.

 

Detailed programme

-- The firm in standard economic theory

-- The firm and information asymmetries

-- The firm in heterodox economic theory

-- Varieties of organisational models

-- Firms’ strategies

-- Firms networks

-- The innovative enterprise

-- Innovation generation and appropriability

-- Diffusion of innovations in the economic system

-- Technological variety and persistence

-- Innovation systems

Readings/Bibliography

The course will be partly based on the following textbooks:

Di Tommaso M., Rubini L., Barbieri E., Tassinari M. (2021), Economia e politica industriale, Il Mulino, Bologna, parts I, II.

Fariselli, P. (2014), Economia dell’innovazione, Giappichelli, Turin, parts I, II, III.

Teaching methods

Teaching will consist of frontal lectures and collective discussions to be held in class on the basis of previously indicated readings.

Assessment methods

For all students, the examination consists of an oral test at the end of the course, to which students are required to register for through the AlmaEsami website.
The assessment for attending students will be based on the discussion, carried out in class, of one or more articles chosen from a series that will be made available during the course.
Students wishing to take the course must have the basics of a course in Economics (Economia Politica), and will only be able to take the exam after passing the Economics (Economia Politica) exam.

Teaching tools

The slides used will be made available to attending students.

Office hours

See the website of Riccardo Leoncini