Work Organisation, Employees’ Education, and Innovation: A Firm-Level Analysis for Italy

Michele Capriati and Marialuisa Divella

L'industria, 2019, issue 3, 417-436

Abstract: This paper explores the relation between work organisation, employees’ education and firms’ innovation capabilities. We argue that, to improve their innovation capabilities, firms should focus more on work organisation, particularly on practices aimed at human capital development by increasing the firm-specific technical skills, engagement and motivation of employees. Moreover, we examine firms’ innovation capabilities from two perspectives: the type of innovation outcomes (product or process innovation) and the strategies of innovation development (generation in-house, generation in cooperation or imitation/adoption). We place greater emphasis on the latter, and thus on the distinction between innovation processes based on internal generation and those that instead rely on external sourcing, which adds a more comprehensive view about the level of firms’ innovation capacity. Our results confirm that, for firms that whish to be more innovative, work organisation matters more than the education level of the workforce.

Keywords: Work Organisation; Employees’ Education; Human Capital; Firms’ Innovation Capabilities. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1430/94755 (application/pdf)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1430/94755 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mul:j0hje1:doi:10.1430/94755:y:2019:i:3:p:417-436

Access Statistics for this article

L'industria is currently edited by Patrizio Bianchi

More articles in L'industria from Società editrice il Mulino
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().