District's manufacturing performances: a comparison among large, small-to-medium sized and district enterprises

A wide literature exists, according to which small-to-medium sized companies perform worse than large ones, due to a lack of human and financial resources, that keep SMEs from adopting new technological solutions and innovative managerial practices, necessary to improve the overall performances. This paper discusses the results of a research aimed at stating whether belonging to an industrial district enables firms to take advantage of the experience of the other members of the same cluster and, thus, to develop some organizational and managerial skills, which only large companies, endowed with a greater amount of human, technical and financial resources, can generally acquire. After a review of the main literature concerning industrial districts and manufacturing and logistics performances in large enterprises and in small-to-medium sized ones, the paper presents the results of a survey that involves a comparison among three samples of large, small-to-medium and district plants of the mechanical industry. Data employed in this analysis have been collected through the Italian Best Factory Award and through an ad hoc survey in an Italian industrial district. The survey shows that large, SMEs and district companies focus on different performance categories, linked to some peculiar features of each typology.