The financial structure of innovative firms in Italy

Innovative companies represent a crucial resource for the development of modern industrial economies: the liveliness and performance of these companies strongly affect the innovative capacity and competitiveness of the economic system. The birth and survival of these companies is influenced by various factors that can be summarized in the two main themes of the knowledge gap and the funding gap. In particular, some characteristics of innovative companies, such as information asymmetries, the absence of guarantees and the high costs related to the estimate of creditworthiness, can become strong impediments to the provision of capital in the form of debt, with impacts on the financial structure of these companies. The paper aims to propose an analysis of the financial structure of innovative firms in Italy. The verification uses the tools of the balance sheet analysis; the survey was conducted on the innovative start-up firms registered in the Italian Innovative Business Register, with the financial statements for the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 available on AIDA database by Bureau Van Dijk. Companies have been subdivided into quartiles on the basis of total assets per year and the analysis focus on the companies of the 1st and 2nd quartile. The results show that companies have a good level of liquidity, while profitability is negative due to the start-up phase. The financial structure indicators highlight a limited ability to obtain credit from third parties and a low level of capitalization. The work is organized as follows: the first paragraph introduces the topic of research, presenting the main findings of the literature on the subject, the second paragraph presents the updated data in May 2018 in relation to the innovative startup registered in the special section of the Italian Business register; the third paragraph presents the results of the analysis; the last paragraph is for the conclusions.