Economic complexity, technological innovation, and co-location of activities

The study aims at leveraging the economic complexity framework to examine how individual firms’ capabilities contribute to broader regional economic development. We used hexagonal H3 grids to segment spatial data from single firm level to macro regions, moving through many gradual increases of scale. For each scale of analysis, we capture the diversity of local capabilities using the education level of employees that fall within a certain hexagon. The distribution of the education levels is not spatially homogeneous across the Italian territory, and it shows non trivial dynamics that should be addressed and discussed when analyzing official statistical data.