Silvano Bertini ADC Project Manager, Head of economic development Unit of Emilia-Romagna Region ADC project FIRST MECHATRONICS SECTORAL WORKING GROUP Mechatronics in Emilia-Romagna Bologna, Italy 18th – 19th January 2011

 Significant sectoral concentrations of firms ;  Strong intersectoral technological, productive and organizational complementarity;  strong relationship of cooperation and exchange.  Regional competitiveness increasingly based on the innovative development of firms within networks, productive and technology sectors and districts, with a strong vocation to internationalization. Productive regional context of Emilia-Romagna

 Almost 50% of manufacturing employment  55% of total exports  Strong demand of research and advanced services  Industrial research laboratories and innovaton centres on engineering, materials, microelectronics, nanotechnologies Mechanic cluster in Emilia-Romagna

primary activities; traditional manufacturing; other industrial activities extra-manufacturing ; manufacturing complementary to the main activities (especially producing intermediate goods such as chemicals etc); technology manufacturing; traditional services directly attributable ; advanced services directly attributable. LIMITS of the CLUSTER analysis difficult to identify the direct relationship with some cross value activities (eg transport and/or computer services in an area with strong sectorial vocation that are targeted mainly to that specific area, but it is not said by the data); difficult to identify second-level relationships (firms in network with other companies, but identified by general-code activities); difficult to identify cases of multiple-product companies that belong to different sectors Cluster definition obtained collecting criteria on:

MECHATRONICS cluster - Economic sectors Mechatronics is the design of machinery, systems and components based on the integration of mechanical, electronic and computer engineering knowledge since project inception. This new production chain uses an all- round approach as early as at the project stage in order to achieve efficient, flexible operation thanks to close interaction with the end user. In many cases, the combination of scientific research and application engineering gives rise to brand new manufacturing applications. However, it is frequently aimed at improving and enhancing existing applications by upgrading the production capacity of mature production equipment.

SPECIALIZATION Importance of the concept of specialization for the Emilia-Romagna Act of the Regional Governament n del 2007  To classify industries in terms of funcional aggregation/ homogeneity of production;  To identify, among these, the most relevant industries for the Region in terms of employment (minimum weight of the sector) and specialization index compared to Italy.

Selection Criteria of the Regional Productive Specializations (1)Index of specialization of each productive sector compared to the national context Indicator: Value of the specialization index (Balassa); > 1, productive specialization <1, de-specialization of production 1 = no specialization (2) Relevance of the productive sector in the regional context Indicator: Weight of employees of the productive sector more than 2% with respect to the regional total of the economic macro-sector of reference At least one of the two criteria must be met

I° quadrant companies that meet both selection criteria (listed above), II° and IV° quadrant companies which meet only one criterion.

Specialized production Comparison of the productive sectors in terms of firms and employees. Emilia-Romagna, year 2008 I°quadrant specialized compartments in terms of both companies and employees, II° quadrant sectors with large companies, III° quadrant sectors that have been selected because they meet the criterion of importance to the production system but not a significant specialization for the regional economic context, IV° quadrant sectors characterized by small enterprises.