Europe is facing an underlying productivity gap between north and south. One reason for this could be the industrial structures. The EU-funded ISEProD project will merge insights and new techniques from industrial organisation and corporate finance to assess the causes and consequences of different industrial structures. Specifically, the project will pursue four different work packages. The first concerns the role of firm ownership, control and risk taking. The second reviews skills supply and the effects of the education of entrepreneurs and managers. The third is the industrial structure, as well as input/output relationships with IT adoption. The fourth is access to finance with asymmetric information and imperfectly competitive financial markets.