Supporting collaboration in European Industrial Districts: the CODESNET approach

The evaluation of the performance of Industrial Districts (ID) is of crucial relevance in every European country, and also outside Europe, owing to the diffusion of IDs in the most relevant industrial sectors. CODESNET, a previous EU-funded project, focused some criteria for ID performance evaluation, and collected a data base of ID presentations. This paper gives a development of the CODESNET results, by motivating and presenting a end-user-oriented procedure for the performance evaluation of an ID and for estimating the potential advantages of either a good coordination of-or a good cooperation among-the SMEs contained within the ID under analysis. Application of the procedure at a number of IDs described in the CODESNET data base is illustrated.