Le Soutien Public aux Projets Innovants de PME : une Evaluation de deux Territoires, en Italie et en France

[Autom. eng. transl.] In the last decades, innovation policies have evolved from one side to the regional dimension and the other towards an indirect or infrastructural approach. Nevertheless, the question of their evaluation remains open, in relation to the numerous failures registered all around the world and to the important expenses intended for these interventions. To help shed light on this problem, we analyzed two rather similar realities: a French competitiveness cluster, located in PACA, and the Italian territory of Canavese in Piedmont. For each territory, a double qualitative and quantitative methodology was used to analyze the relevance of innovative projects, allocated to local SMEs, the growth of the areas studied and their correlation with the performance of the companies involved. The results show important differences according to the type of project, service and units concerned, but they highlight, in the two cases analyzed, on the one hand, the certain growth of the companies involved, which is realized during the period of service allocation and the next 2-3 years; on the other hand, the different reaction of the units analyzed, for a longer period: it depends on certain factors related to the technological and economic states of the companies, which will be better explained in the following work.