**2.2 Industrial district**

The industrial districts are a field of analysis that is very rich in contributions that have outlined, in a complex way, the profile and characteristics of the production systems. In the Italian economics and business sphere, the concept of ID was first introduced [28] in a contribution intended to integrate Marshallian thought on business clusters with reflections and research on the nature of industrial development in more recent decades. The ID and its configurations are defined as

*Current Issues in Knowledge Management*

opportunities [23].

*The knowledge transfer process.*

**Figure 2.**

tion to learn [23].

consolidation of routines [23].

b.**Communication:** once acquired, knowledge can be communicated. The communication can be written or verbal. There may be both barriers to knowledge transfer and the risk of losing information during the process. The communication mechanisms must be developed so as to encourage knowledge transfer

c.**Application:** the knowledge acquired and communicated can be applied for preservation. The results of the application of knowledge allow the organiza-

d.**Acceptance:** in order for knowledge to be assimilated, after having been acquired and communicated, it must be accepted; otherwise the knowledge

e.**Assimilation:** it represents the key to the knowledge transfer process. The assimilation of the results influences its applicability; this happens through the

In the process of knowledge transfer and like more in the sharing process, the personal interaction is fundamental [23]: the receiver must be able to understand the context in which the source of knowledge finds itself acting, in order to learn it and make it its own [23]; the system in which the two subjects operate must promote and encourage the interaction between the involved subjects. KT can be realized into an intra-organizational and an inter-organizational level: the fundamental difference existing between two atmospheres of reference resides in the fact that, while in the same organization the sharing of common cultural values can enface the process, many other problems affect inter-organizational knowledge

The main barriers that the transfer can find, on its distance, are represented by:

a.**Culture:** it is the collective programming of the mind that identifies one group or one category of people over another [24]. It reflects the ideas, values, and meanings shared by the members of a society and handed down by families and communities. In a learning system, culture shapes the processes through which to create, legitimize and distribute new organizational knowledge [24].

b.**Values:** they are global beliefs or abstract ideas that automatically guide actions and judgements through specific objects and situations. Values are derived from culture and play an important role in shaping the manager's attitudes about work as well as the choices they make and the behaviors they engage in [24].

transferred is not internalized by the subject who receives it [23].

**110**

transfer.

"a socio-territorial entity characterized by the simultaneous active presence, in a circumscribed territorial area, determined from a naturalistic and historical point of view, by a community of people and business population" [29]: it constitutes a productive area, in which the factors of the sociocultural matrix are placed as determinants of the competitive advantage achieved by small businesses located in the same geographical unit [30, 31]. In these terms, it derives from the interaction, both of economic-industrial elements and of a historical-sociological nature. Thus, the district is an integrated, ordered system of companies in which the local culture serves as the unifying element. The individual components become functions of the whole, or expressions of the connections with the other units, and are both cause and effect of the social environment. Some Italian economists and sociologists, starting from the concept of the Marshallian agglomeration of companies, have given a strong improvement in building and highlighting the concept of ID, as a new research unit of economic analysis [28] halfway between the concept of industry and business. The authors grouped in the neo-Marshallian approach contribute to the definition of industrial districts—as a complex socio-economic environment—which present unique characteristics both in the economic-structural and sociocultural profile. In this perspective, the transationalist study [32–35] aims to identify a particular configuration of the institutional environment and the community market and places the district as a form of industrial organization located in the half between market and hierarchy. The association of the ID with the flexible specialization model, alternative to mass production [36], has increased the interest in the new business category, supporting new study perspectives; these perspectives are focused on the analysis of clusters as evolution of interorganic systems, networks and cognitive systems, within which the driving role of the individual companies that inhabit the area plays a central role. More recent are the studies of business economics that tend to report the survey on the business district, individually designed, on the interpretation of the relational ties that are established between the different district actors, i.e. a relational approach, and on the company analysis as a cognitive system [37–42]. Interest has also grown internationally: of particular interest are the reflections of scholars of economic geography, in particular, by Krugman [43] and Porter's [44] position on cluster, seen as a key element for the competitiveness of nations. Industrial district, cluster, local innovation system, innovative environment and innovative local "milieu" (environment) are the names proposed by various research contributions. In the 1990s, while other studies continued to rework the Marshallian model of districts, an important new classification of ID was proposed by Markusen [45].
