Publications
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Sector dynamics and demographics of top R&D firms in the global economy
This paper investigates the sectoral dynamics of the major economies during the last decade through the lens of the top… Show more 1000 R&D investors worldwide and looks at how firms' demographics are related to sector distribution. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the EU corporate R&D intensity gap as well as on that on industrial dynamics. Contrary to the common understanding, the results show that in the EU the distribution of R&D among sectors has changed more than in the USA, which has experienced a shift mainly towards ICT-related sectors. In both the EU and the USA the pace of R&D change is slower than in the emerging economies. Furthermore, the EU has been better able than the USA and Japan to maintain its world share of R&D investment. Even more interestingly, the results show that age is strongly related to the sector (and dominant technology) in which firms operate. This suggests that focusing on sector (technological) dynamics could be even more relevant from a policy perspective than focusing only on young leading innovators. In fact, EU firms are less able to create or enter new high-tech sectors in a timely way and fully exploit the growth opportunities offered by first mover advantages. Show less
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PDF The 2016 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard
The 2016 edition of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard) analyses the 2500 companies investing the largest sums… Show more in R&D in the world in the fiscal year 2015/16. It comprises companies based in the EU (590), the US (837), Japan (356), China (327), Taiwan (111), South Korea (75), Switzerland (58) and further 20 countries. Show less
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PDF Industrial Research and Innovation: Evidence for Policy
This policy brief addresses the results of the fifth European Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation CONCORDi 2015, on 'Industrial… Show more Research and Innovation: evidence for policy'. Taking stock from the underlined background issues, the document presents the main evidence-based insights for policy drawing upon the contributions and debates. It also highlights the main implications for industrial and innovation policies making and for the science-policy interface. A series of open questions for policy and evidence makers conclude the brief. Show less
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Quantitative Analysis of Technology Futures: A Review of Techniques, Uses and Characteristics. Science and Public Policy, forthcoming. DOI:10.1093/scipol/scv059
A variety of quantitative techniques have been used in the past in future-oriented technology analysis (FTA). In recent years, increased… Show more computational power and data availability have led to the emergence of new techniques that are potentially useful for foresight and forecasting. As a result, there are now many techniques that might be used in FTA exercises. This paper reviews and qualifies quantitative methods for FTA in order to help users to make choices among alternative techniques, including new techniques that have not yet been integrated into the FTA literature and practice. We first provide a working definition of FTA and discuss its role, uses and popularity over recent decades. Second, we select the most important quantitative FTA techniques, discuss their main contexts and uses, and classify them into groups with common characteristics, positioning them along key dimensions: descriptive/prescriptive, extrapolative/normative, data gathering/inference, and forecasting/foresight. Show less
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Barriers to innovation and firm productivity. Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Vol. 25, Issue 3, pp. 321-334. DOI:10.1080/10438599.2015.1076193
The paper analyzes the effect of financial, knowledge, demand, market structure and regulation barriers to innovation on firms' economic performance.… Show more It contributes to the literature on barriers to innovation by accounting for the heterogeneous effects that each barrier has on firms across the productivity distribution. We do so by employing both quantile regression techniques and matching estimators on this UK CIS panel 2002–2010 merged with the Business Structure Database. While we find evidence that both the cost and also the availability of finance negatively affect productivity across the whole distribution, the lack of qualified personnel mostly hinders high productivity firms. Moreover, quantile regression reveals some interesting variation in effect sizes across the (conditional) productivity distribution. Show less
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Financing constraints, R&D investments and innovative performances: new empirical evidence at the firm level for Europe. Economic of Innovation and New Technology. Vol. 25, issue 3, pp. 183-196. DOI: 10.1080/10438599.2015.1076194
The relationship between financing constraints, investments in research and development (R&D) and innovative performances has recently attracted renewed attention in… Show more the aftermath of a financial crisis that has led to problems of access to the credit on which innovation activities crucially rely. In spite of past developments in the theoretical analysis and in the data and methodologies for empirical investigation, some issues have remained unexplored to date. In this introduction to the special issue, we examine the contribution of the papers it contains, which provide new conceptualisations and empirical evidence at the firm level for Europe. Most previous research results, which were mainly based on extending models of financing constraints and physical investments to R&D investments, are confirmed, while new insights about this relationship are uncovered, in terms of the structural characteristics of the constrained firms, of the industries in which they operate, of their innovative activities and of the innovation outcomes they achieve. Show less
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PDF Leading R&D Investors for the Dynamics of Innovation Ecosystems
This policy brief discusses the key role of large R&D investors in the dynamics of innovation ecosystems. In a context… Show more of accelerated technological change and increasing global competition, firms should develop complex innovative solutions requiring the interaction of multiple-players. Therefore, knowledge integration becomes a key strategic dimension to keep the edge in the global competition and ecosystems of innovation are privileged 'places' where it can be organised in a way that ensures the creation of a higher collective value. Evidence shows that leading R&D investors can play a pivotal role in the establishment and development of such ecosystems, by bringing the necessary assets (resources, knowledge, capabilities and leadership) to activate their dynamics (along the three dimensions of interdependence, integration and initiative). This brief identifies a number of policy interventions to support the functioning of such innovation ecosystems and calls to tailor the interventions in accordance to the stage of development of the given ecosystem. Show less
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PDF World Corporate Top R&D Investors: Innovation and IP bundles
This report presents original data and statistics on the innovation output of world top corporate R&D investors. Essentially descriptive in… Show more nature, it presents statistics about the technological profiles of companies, their trademark strategies for new products and services and about the extent to which these two forms of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) are bundled to protect and appropriate the returns from investment in knowledge-based assets. The report provides interesting insights about the innovation strategies of this sample of world leading corporate R&D investors and opens the door to further research and analysis about companies' global strategies for knowledge development and exploitation. The main target audience of this report is the policy and research communities, as well as analysts with an interest in supporting evidence-based policy making in the area of innovation and industrial policies. This joint EC-OECD report builds on the efforts to collect up-to-date, reliable and comparable company data on the top corporate R&D investors worldwide carried-out by the European Commission since 2004 (the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard publication) and on the solid knowledge and experience of the OECD in developing and providing robust and state of the art indicators on science, technology and industry (see for example OECD's STI Scoreboard publications). To access the EC-JRC/OECD COR&DIP© database, v.0. 2015 (raw data provided in flat files), please fill in the on-line form at: Access to COR&DIP© Show less
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Employment Effect of Innovation
This paper estimates and decomposes the employment effect of innovation by R&D intensity levels. Our microeconometric analysis is based on… Show more a large international panel data set from the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, and our proxy for innovation intensity is a measurable and continuous variable. Employing flexible semi-parametric methods - the generalised propensity score - allows us to recover the full functional relationship between R&D investment and firm employment, and to address important econometric issues, which is not possible in the standard estimation approach used in previous literature. Our results suggest that modest innovators do not create and may even destruct jobs by raising their R&D expenditures. Most of the jobs in the economy are created by innovation followers: increasing innovation by 1% may increase employment up to 0.7%. The job creation effect of innovation reaches its peak when R&D intensity is around 100% of the total capital expenditure, after which the positive employment effect declines and becomes statistically insignificant. Innovation leaders do not create jobs by further increasing their R&D expenditures, which are already very high. Show less