Territorial servitisation in Italy: Towards territorial recoupling

Integration between manufacturing and service activities currently represents a core source of competitiveness for firms and territories. Furthermore, a growing literature analyses the phenomenon of territorial servitisation, namely the co-location of manufacturing and Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) activities. This article investigates the process of territorial servitisation in Italy by analysing the diffusion of KIBS activities in four different types of local production systems. It distinguishes between professional KIBS and technological KIBS. The magnitude and growth of KIBS and their co-location with manufacturing industries are described by means of firm employment data, location quotients, co-location maps and econometric analysis. Results show that Italy is still experimenting a generalised decoupling phenomenon between manufacturing and KIBS activities, especially professional KIBS, with the latter concentrated in large urban local systems. Technological KIBS also tend to decouple from manufacturing local production systems, especially from those dominated by large enterprises and those specialised in low-tech sectors. Despite the revealed spatial decoupling, we find an ongoing process of coupling, that is, closer proximity, between more traditional manufacturing industries and both professional and technological KIBS.