Insights for place-sensitive innovation policies: evidence from SMEs’ preferences for additive manufacturing

Abstract This paper quantifies the extent to which territorial context shapes Spanish manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) preferences and trade-offs for adopting additive manufacturing technologies across varying institutional support configurations. Using a discrete choice experiment, we simulate a stylized public programme to elicit trade-offs across four policy dimensions: training, financing, logistics, and business development. Results from a conditional logit model indicate that along cost, financing dominates preferences, while logistics support is more salient for rural SMEs. Formal training appears less well-aligned with firms’ short-term operational needs. Willingness-to-pay estimates confirm these patterns, and adoption simulations highlight the importance of combining policy support instruments in a place-sensitive manner. Our findings provide policy-relevant behavioural insights for regional innovation policy. We demonstrate that stated-preference methods can inform the ex-ante design of targeted support mechanisms and help overcome the limitations of one-size-fits-all approaches.