publications

2025

1. European National Innovation Policies: A Review of Policy Designs and Scopes

   Elena Cefis and Stefania Scrofani

   2025

   Abs DOI

   This study examines how European Union member countries, plus the United Kingdom, have approached the common challenge of digital transformation within their respective national contexts, answering the call of the Digitising European Industry Initiative. They have implemented diverse policy designs tailored to the characteristics of their National Systems of Innovation, addressing different priorities, despite the shared pillars emphasised by the Digitising European Industry Initiative and the prevalence of SMEs in the industry. This chapter investigates the differences in the national policy designs for digitalisation and Industry 4.0 in Europe by comparing the policies, examining the implemented policy designs, identifying specific country features influencing such designs and clustering these policies according to their priorities and scopes.

2. Innovation policies and firms’ productivity: the Italian Industry 4.0 Plan for digital transformation

   Elena Cefis, Stefania Scrofani, and Matteo Tubiana

   Journal of Technology Transfer, 2025

   Abs DOI

   Industry 4.0 technologies radically change industrial processes. National governments have enacted innovation policies to support firms’ investments in new technologies and increase productivity growth. The Italian Industry 4.0 Plan (II4.0 Plan) was implemented with this purpose in 2017 and consisted of a horizontal fiscal plan. Using a new methodology that relies on firms’ financial accounts rather than survey data, we identify firms that benefited from the II4.0 Plan’s incentives and extend the analysis to the population of Italian firms. The results from a Difference-in-Differences regression approach show that the investments spurred by the II4.0 Plan positively affect firms’ labour productivity but heterogeneously among size classes, sectors and type of incentive. Hyper and super amortization and the credit for innovation drive the results. We frame our policy evaluation into the most recent discussion about innovation policies, raising some criticisms on the appropriateness of horizontal policies to foster digital transformation.