This paper investigates the role of external relationships as key drivers of small business innovation. An empirical analysis is based on data for approximately 500 small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in six European countries. The results indicate that innovation performance is higher in SMEs that are proactive in strengthening their relationships with innovative suppliers, users, and customers. Furthermore, the findings of this paper support the view that SMEs will have better new product development results if they improve their relationships with laboratories and research institutes.

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This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the determinants of differentials in firms' productivity. We test the hypothesis that macro factors, especially the quality of local institutions, play a central role in explaining firm productivity in Italy. To this end, we construct measures of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) for about 4,000 firms by means of different estimation techniques, and a province-level index of institutional quality. Then, we estimate the relationship between institutional quality and firm-level TFP. Our results show that the existence of better local institutions might help firms to become more productive.

The literature on immigrant entrepreneurship has richly described the characteristics and peculiarities of ethnic businesses catering to enclave markets. However, several indications suggest that immigrant-owned firms are increasingly entering mainstream markets and changing both their internal structures and their external networks with resource providers. One of the most substantial changes, which has been overlooked by researchers, consists of the appearance of what we define as 'multiculturally hybrid firms', which are firms that rely on inter-ethnic managerial or labour resources to carry out their activities. Therefore, in this paper we provide an understanding of the variables that affect the recourse to solutions of multicultural hybridism in the entrepreneurial teams and personnel of immigrantowned firms. We conduct our empirical analyses on data collected through interviews on a sample of 130 immigrant entrepreneurs in Italy. Our results show that multicultural hybridism is mainly driven by the size of the founding team, the business's maturity, the entrepreneurs' host-country language competence and by entrepreneurs' motivation by individual goals rather than community goals. This research advances our knowledge about immigrant entrepreneurship by focusing on firm-level dimensions such as the diversity of entrepreneurial teams and employees, which are increasingly relevant in our multicultural societies.

Abstruct-This paper describes an approach for pedestrian detection in stem infrared images. The developed system has been implemented on an experimental vehicle equipped with two infrared camera and preliiariIy tested in diBerent situations. It is based on the localization and distance estimation of warm areas in the scene; the algorithm groups areas with similar position and considers only results with specific size and aspect ratio. A final validation process, based on the head shape's morphological and thermal characteristics, is used to build the list of potential pedestrian appearing in the scene. Neither temporal correlation, nor motion cues are used in this processing.