This research reunites three fundamental aspects for enterprise competitiveness: innovation, territory and social networks. Innovation is one of the main sources of competitiveness that allows a company to respond successfully to the necessities of its environment. In the case of industrial districts, the innovation process is affected by specific conditions of access, assimilation and exploitation of knowledge resources. These conditions can be derived from the characteristics of the social networks that are developed within the company.
The more concrete objective of this research consists of studying to what extent the social capital influences the capacity of absorption of the company, and how this, in turn, influences the innovation process, centering our study on the context of an industrial district.
For the confirmation of our theoretical arguments, the empirical part of this research has had as its object of study the total population of companies that make up the valencian textile district.
We have arrived at the following main conclusions: a) The conceptualization of the industrial district as a cohesive social network strongly interlinked which has led us to suppose the existence of embeddedness that generate social integration mechanisms which allow for the reduction of the barriers between  external knowledge to the company and its acquisition and exploitation, increasing in this way the capacity of absorption of the companies belonging to the network; b) The externalities that the company receives in the form of knowledge originating from the environment in which it operates along with the necessary abilities, in our case the particular dimensions of the absorption capacity, benefit the development of innovation in the company and c) Greater investments of resources in R+D, innovation effort, on the part of the company  does not always mean better results in a parallel way. The existence of other structural moderators, such as for example the type of industry or the environment can cause saturation levels that would imply the appearance of decreasing yields.
We think that the theoretical proposal as well as the obtained results is an excellent contribution to diverse lines of investigation. On the one hand, they show the capacity of social capital to explain the innovation process and, on the other hand, it allows us to improve the understanding of the model of industrial district to explain the benefits generated by the physical and cognitive proximity of the companies. Also we think that the results of the study allow us to elaborate a series of prescriptions for the wider area of local and regional institutions as well as for the scope of the individual company.