The Role of Innovation Poles in Agri-food System Development: The Case of Abruzzo’s Model

The Innovation Poles represent a new industrial policy instrument to support the competitiveness of companies that favor the sharing of knowledge between companies and the convergence of investments on trajectories of innovation. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the case of Abruzzo Innovation Pole “Agire” Consortium, a cluster that includes food companies and joint research, innovation and strategic services. Results showed that requirements of companies to improve their competitiveness are not only devoted to research and innovation in strictly sense (product/process) but also to the exigence of general improvement of services oriented to market development, internationalization / export and support in participation in calls for projects proposal; companies’ point out the high cost of innovation as the main limitation; a general strategy improving internal and external policies could overcome or limit this barrier and facilitate the symbiosis process .