Publications
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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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PDF The Specialisation of EU Regions in Fast Growing and Key Enabling Technologies
In the context of the Europe 2020 objective of establishing in the EU a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy, European… Show more regions have been called to design and implement national and regional 'Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation' (RIS3). The rationale behind the concept of smart specialisation is that, in a context of global competition for talent and resources, most regions can only acquire a real competitive edge by finding niches or by mainstreaming new technologies into traditional industries and exploiting their ‘smart' regional potential. Although the most promising way for a region to promote its knowledge-based growth is to diversify into technologies, products and services that are closely related to existing dominant technologies and the regional skills base, the European Commission puts special emphasis on a set of technologies labelled as 'Key Enabling Technologies' (KETs). Despite the great emphasis on KETs, there is only very limited evidence on the capability of EU regions to specialise in these fields and there are no studies directly investigating the actual impact of these technologies on regional innovation and economic growth. This report aims at filling these gaps by: i) looking at the relationship between KETs and 'Fast Growing Technologies' (FGTs); ii) providing empirical evidence on the EU regional specialisation in KETs and FGTs; iii) relating technological specialisation to regional innovation and economic growth. In particular, the report aims at answering these questions: 1) Which technologies have emerged as the fastest growing ones in the recent decades? 2) Is there a relationship between fast growing technologies and KETs? 3) Which regions are specialised in FGTs and KETs? 4) Are there convergence and polarization phenomena observable in the evolution of EU regions' innovative activities in fast growing technologies and KETs? 5) Do EU regions specialized in fastest growing technological fields and key enabling technologies exhibit higher innovation and economic performances? The main results of the report can be summarised as follows. First, only a small share of KETs are also fast growing technologies, although the degree of overlapping between KETs and FGTs varies substantially across different KETs fields. Second, while KETs are concentrated in Central Europe, FGTs prevail in Scandinavian countries and the UK. Third, while there is evidence of some regional convergence in KETs and, to a less extent, in FGTs, spatial correlation increases over time, showing that diffusion often occurs across contiguous regions. Finally, the results of the estimations of the effects of FGTs and KETs on innovation (patents) and economic (GDP per capita) growth show that only specialisation in KETs directly affects economic growth, while specialisation in FGTs has an impact on growth only indirectly, that is through its impact on regions' innovation performances. Overall, these results confirm the pervasive and enabling role of KETs pointing to the importance for European regions to target these technologies as part of their RIS3 strategies. 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 The capability of the EU R&D Scoreboard companies to develop Advanced Manufacturing Technologies
The aim of this study is to provide empirical evidence at the firm level about the role of Advanced Manufacturing… Show more Technologies (AMTs) and Key Enabling Technologies (KETS) and the impact of innovation in these technologies on the efficiency and productivity of companies across various industrial sectors using data from the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard). The principal aim of this report is to describe the profile of the patent portfolios of the companies in the Scoreboard, to link their innovation output to input in terms of R&D expenditures and to draw useful conclusions about the policy implications at the level of the EU Member States. The data source for the input is the 2013 edition of the Scoreboard and the outputs and patent applications and further patent-related indicators at the transnational level from the Worldwide Patent Statistical Database (PATSTAT). The focus is on the firm-level data and the basic questions addressed are as follows: What firms are responsible for most of the patent filings in AMTs and KETs and which are the main industrial sectors responsible for patent filings within the two technology fields? Where have the R&D activities taken place? Which countries and which sectors are most actively inventing AMTs and KETs? Among companies in the Scoreboard there is a correlation between R&D expenditure and investment in innovation and innovation output, as measured by KET- and AMT-related transnational patent filings. 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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PDF Determinants of R&D offshoring
We analyse determinants of an enterprise's decision to offshore R&D activities using a novel data set for enterprises in Ireland… Show more over the period 2001-2006. Our results suggest that, on average, other things equal, enterprises integrated in international production and innovation networks, and enterprises which used information and communication technologies (ICT) more intensively were more likely to offshore R&D. Furthermore, characteristics of the import source region had an important influence on enterprise offshoring behaviour, with offshoring to regions outside of the advanced European Union's economies being less likely. Show less