Firms’ perceptions of barriers to innovation and resilience: the Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia during the crisis

This paper connects the literature on obstacles to innovation to the concept of regional economic resilience by empirically assessing the relationship between the intensity of firms’ engagement in innovative activities and self-reported obstacles to innovation during the unfolding of the latest economic and financial downturn. The analysis is grounded on a unique dataset on firm-level accounting data (CAD) and on information from two waves (2008-10 and 2010-12) of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) for a representative sample of firms in the Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia. The main results support the existence of severe deterring barriers in the region, suggesting that during the economic and financial crisis after 2008 firms’ uncertainty about the market demand became dominant.