Lo sviluppo del capitale umano quale obiettivo delle politiche industriali e condizione per le agevolazioni finanziarie

In European and national industrial policies, economic growth and development are fundamental goals to be achieved. Perhaps promoting innovation is considered a central way to achieve such goals through fostering innovation in many fields. Consequently, employment rests in the heart of those policies, in particular, creating the conditions for the enhancement of human capital and to promote quality employment in line with the underlying skills and training of human resources. In this study, we investigate the role of innovative start-ups in Italy in creating enabling environments for employment besides their financial health. The analysis aims at studying the dynamics of innovative start-ups in the industrial and service sectors under four characterizing profiles: size, growth, profitability, and financial structure. The various start-up profiles are analyzed with respect to the geographic location and the development of human capital in terms of female employment, youth employment, and highly skilled employment, such as university graduates, master's degrees, and PhDs. Our research question is to investigate whether there are significant differences among economic sectors of innovative start-ups in terms of financial and human capital characteristics. We analyzed 2493 innovative start-up firms over the period 2013 to 2016 using descriptive statistics and panel OLS regression analysis to capture the economic and statistical differences among sectors. Results show that there are significant differences among the two sectors in terms of size and financial structure, while differences are not significant in terms of profitability and growth. According to such findings, it should be noted, however, that the time horizon is short to measure growth (considering the missing observations) and the profitability in innovative start-ups tends to show up in the longer term. With respect to firm-specific characteristics, the following relations are found: being in the South and having a greater prevalence of women and young people is negatively associated with the size, while the requirement of high professionalism of the employed is significant only in terms of the size of total assets. Finally, innovative start-up firms in the industrial and service sectors have overwhelmingly different structural characteristics, with implications on financial needs (more accentuated in industrial ones), on employment, and sensitivity to various industrial policy incentives. Therefore, industrial policies tackling innovation should, somehow, be tailor-made according to sector-specific characteristics to achieve the macro objectives of such policies.