Universities and research centres play a major role in the generation and
diffusion of innovation through education, research, spin-offs and technology transfer. This paper examines a further pattern for the spread of innovation within a regional economy, namely the transfer of workers from one employer to another. Our
approach is based on the ”labour market” dataset, from which we derive a network
by applying an ad-hoc edge weighting strategy. We propose a novel approach to
explore the network structure, using a consensus community detection approach
that assigns a probability of membership and isolates trivially small communities.
Applying the methodology to the Friuli Venezia Giulia region shows that research
institutions play a prominent role in innovation patterns, being the leading elements
of large communities and often outperforming large industrial groups.
