Industrial districts, a strong point of Italian manufacturing, expects their overall turnover to increase by 3.1 percent in 2015 and 3.2 percent in 2016, exceeding pre-crisis levels, a report by Intesa SanPaolo said.
The report was unveiled early this week by the research department of Italy's second largest bank by assets. It analyzed the balance sheets of 46,500 manufacturing and agricultural firms, some 12,100 of which belong to 144 traditional industrial districts and 2,514 to technological hubs.
Industrial districts have long since distinguished Italy's economy, representing all major "made in Italy" productions such as fashion, clothing, textiles, leather goods and shoes, wine, food, engineering and machinery.
Districts' businesses grew almost 5 percent more than so-called non-district firms between 2008 and 2014, and their estimated turnover increased by 1 percent in 2014 while the rest of nation's manufacturing sector was close to stagnation, the report said.
According to analysts, the better performance of Italian industrial districts was due to "a greater ability to export, make foreign investments, and register patents and trademarks."
"The industrial district model has always been characterized by a high concentration of small firms and a strong interaction between them, and this model by itself favors innovation," Fabrizio Guelpa, head of industry and banking at Intesa SanPaolo's research department, told Xinhua.
"However, a key factor has added to its traditional innovation capacity in recent years: a prominent role taken by medium-large sized companies strongly focused on innovation," he said.
Medium-large and large companies constituted 40.6 percent of all businesses in Italian districts, some 4 percent higher than national average, according to Italy's National Institute for Statistics, Istat's latest data.
These leading companies not only innovated within their own productive processes, but by impacting the production of the single components in the chain, they also led smaller firms towards greater innovation.
"Within this cooperative strategy, these companies are able to make sure every component is more and more innovative, up to the final product," Guelpa explained./.