Publications
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PDF The 2014 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard
The 2014 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard) contains economic and financial data for the world's top 2500 companies… Show more ranked by their investments in research and development (R&D). The sample consists of 633 companies based in the EU and 1867 companies based elsewhere. The Scoreboard data are drawn from the latest available companies' accounts, i.e. usually the fiscal year 2013/14. Show less
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PDF CONCORDi-2013 Summary Report
The report intends to summarise the main results of the CONCORDi-2013 Conference. Section 1 introduces the rationale and the objectives… Show more of the Conference; section 2 summarises the contribution of the keynote speakers; section 3 and 4 sum up the main results of the Parallel Sessions; session 5 introduces the Best Paper Awards, whereas section 6 briefly reports on the discussion made by the policy stakeholders. Finally, section 7 recapitulates the main conclusions. Show less
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PDF Attracting foreign direct investment without weakening domestic firms
The present policy brief builds on a recent study designed to provide insights that support the need for a comprehensive… Show more policy approach which simultaneously aims at attracting foreign direct investments while strengthening the competitiveness of domestic firms. More in detail, the applied framework provides policy-makers with an instrument to understand when foreign investments are beneficial with respect to knowledge inflows and when they start to jeopardise the competitiveness of local firms. This has interesting policy implications in relation to various relevant aspects of the Europe 2020 agenda, such as the need to strengthen the competitiveness of European firms in the global economy, by, among other things, promoting and supporting their mobility within the Internal Market, their internationalisation, and their capacity to contribute to and benefit from international knowledge flows. Show less
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PDF The effect of innovative SMEs' growth to the structural renewal of the EU economy - A projection to the year 2020 -
This Policy Brief addresses the following question: To what extent the high-growth of current innovative R&D-intensive SMEs can drive the… Show more envisaged structural change of the EU economy towards high R&D intensive sectors? It aims to contribute to the debate about how to set the right priorities and find the most appropriate policy interventions to allow Europe to reach the 3% R&D intensity target and hence its growth and employment objectives. It first summarises stylised findings from the literature on the relevance of innovative companies for economic growth, then presents results from a recent JRC-IPTS study which go some way towards answering the question posed above, and concludes by outlining some of the contributions that enrich the policy debate. Show less
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PDF The "green impact" of the open innovation mode. Bridging knowledge sourcing and absorptive capacity for environmental innovations
This Policy Brief presents recent results on the impact that an open innovation mode has on European firms' environmental innovations.… Show more New evidence drawn from the CIS suggests that knowledge sourcing can increase the environmental innovation performance of firms. However, the way firms search for external knowledge and work to absorb it can lead them to different results, depending on whether they are involved in the adoption of an eco-innovation or the extension of their eco-innovation portfolio. Drawing on these results, policy implications for the European Research and Innovation Agenda are discussed. Show less
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PDF Mind the Science and Technology Skills Gap
This Policy Brief shows new evidence on the causes of the S&T skills gap in European regions. It highlights that… Show more the S&T skills gap is mainly due to shortages of capabilities that are crucial to support the innovation and growth of firms and the other actors of the regional system, including university and government. From these findings, ad hoc policy implications upon the development of innovation capabilities and skills for the European Research Strategy and Innovation agenda are proposed and future research issues identified. Show less
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PDF The 2013 Survey on R&D Investment Business Trends
This report presents the findings of the eigth survey on trends in industrial R&D investment. It analyses the 172 responses… Show more of mainly large firms from a subsample of 1000 EU-based companies in the 2012 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. These 172 companies are responsible for R&D investment worth € 62 billion, constituting around 41% of the total R&D investment by the 1000 EU Scoreboard companies. The main findings are as follows: The main conclusion is that, between 2013-15, the responding companies expect to increase their R&D investments by 2.6 % on average per year. Due to decreased expectations in the automobiles & parts sector, this is a third lower than in the previous survey. For some sectors, the expected R&D investment changes have increased compared to our previous surveys: electronic & electrical equipment (9 % p.a. over the next three years), general industrials (7 %), construction & materials (7 %), pharmaceuticals & biotechnology (4 %), and technology hardware & equipment (4 %). The responding companies carry out a quarter of their R&D outside the EU. Their expectations for R&D investment for the next three years show continued participation of European companies in the global economy, in particular growth opportunities in emerging economies, while maintaining an R&D focus in the EU. Two thirds of the European companies in the sample chose their home country as the most attractive location for R&D, and identified the US, Germany, China and India as the most attractive locations outside their home country. Knowledge-sharing, human resources, proximity to other company sites and market demand make countries attractive for R&D activities. Comparing the attractiveness for R&D activities of the surveyed companies among eight EU countries, quality of R&D personnel and knowledge-sharing opportunities with universities and public organisations are most frequently stated among the top three. Comparing the attractiveness of the EU to the US, geographic proximity is leading before knowledge sharing opportunities and R&D personnel. Comparing the attractiveness of the EU to the one of China and India, for the EU geographic proximity to other company sites and technology poles & incubators is a factor for attractiveness. For China and India proximity to suppliers is making these countries attractive. Show less
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PDF Innovation and Job Creation. A sustainable relation?
This study compares the employment growth patterns of innovative and non-innovative firms focusing on whether there are systematic differences in… Show more the persistence of the jobs created. Using data from a unique longitudinal dataset of 3,300 Spanish firms over the years 2002-2009, obtained by matching different waves of the "Encuesta sobre Innovación en las Empresas españolas" and adopting a semiparametric quantile regression approach, we examine employment serial correlation. The empirical results of the study indicate that the jobs created by innovative firms generally appear to be rather persistent over time whereas those created by non-innovative firms do not. Among declining firms, non-innovators tend to deteriorate faster in terms of economic performance. In addition, among those firms experiencing high organic employment growth, smaller and younger innovative firms grow more on average than larger innovative firms. Overall, evidence suggests that being innovative supports and stabilises a firm's organic employment growth pattern and being smaller and younger seems to be a sufficient condition to experience high employment growth, i.e. - with regard to the latter - it is not necessary to have a comparably high R&D spending / being an R&D intensive company. Show less
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PDF The production function of top R&D investors: Accounting for size and sector heterogeneity with quantile estimations
This paper investigates how top R&D investors differ in the production impact of their inputs and in their rate of… Show more technical change. We use the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard and perform a quantile estimation of an augmented Cobb-Douglass production function for a panel of more than 1,000 companies, covering the period 2002-2010. The results for the pooled sample are contrasted with those obtained from the estimates for different groups of economic sectors. Returns to scale are bounded by the initial size of the firm, but to an extent that decreases with the technological intensity of the sector. The output return of knowledge capital is the most important, irrespective of firm size, but in high-tech sectors only. Elsewehere, physical capital is the pivotal factor, although with size variations. The investigated firms appear different also in their technical progress: embodied in mid-high and low/mid-low tech sectors, and disembodied in high-tech sectors. Show less
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PDF Knowledge Search versus Knowledge Deployment:How Foreignness can be both an Asset and a Liability for Firms
Many modern firms compete globally. However, research into whether foreignness is an asset or a liability in competition with domestic… Show more firms is inconclusive. We argue that foreign MNC subsidiaries are not per se advantaged or disadvantaged. We suggest that the distinction originates from the nature of the subsidiary's activity in the host country. We focus on two activities: knowledge search and knowledge deployment. We predict theoretically that domestic firms have advantages when they search for knowledge due to their embeddedness in the host country. However, this increased embeddedness reduces the degree of novelty of their knowledge pool. Foreign MNC subsidiaries therefore have advantages in knowledge deployment because they draw from a richer, international knowledge pool. However, these advantages accrue to both foreign and domestic MNCs. We test and support these predictions for a longitudinal dataset of 2900 firm observations in Spain. We develop recommendations for research and practice based on these findings. Show less