An innovative use of spatial sampling designs is here presented. Sampling methods which consider
spatial locations of statistical units are already used in agricultural and environmental contexts,
while they have never been exploited for establishment surveys. However, the rapidly increasing
availability of georeferenced information about business units makes that possible. In business
studies, it may indeed be important to take into account the presence of spatial autocorrelation or
spatial trends in the variables of interest, in order to have more precise and efficient estimates.
The opportunity of using the most innovative spatial sampling designs in business surveys, in or-der to produce samples that are well spread in space, is here tested by means of Monte Carlo ex-periments.