Publications
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PDF Corporate Venture Capital in the Automotive Sector
The ongoing transformation of the automotive sector is in part driven by factors such as the unrelenting onslaught of electric/hybrid… Show more powertrain technologies, in-vehicle and networked software applications, rising demand for electric vehicles, and the emergence of new entrants like Tesla and others notably in China. The response of automotive firms to these challenges includes, inter alia, Open Innovation (OI) tools and strategies of which Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) is one element. CVC investments by large automotive companies are globally spread, but there is a clear concentration of these investments in the US, particularly in California. The vast majority of CVC investments in startups are made in conjunction with other co-investors, reflecting the high-risk nature of the innovative technologies being developed. Newcomers to the automotive industry, such as Tesla and BYD, are primarily beneficiaries of venture capital financing, including corporate VC, rather than themselves engaging in venture financing. Despite a drop in CVC in 2023, the rising trend in automotive CVC may return over the medium to long term, driven by increasing startup activity in automotive-relevant areas. Show less
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Innovation dynamics in the automotive industry
This brief provides JRC firm-level microdata-based analyses of innovation dynamics in the global automotive industry comparing EU firms to their… Show more global competitors. It takes the sector's top global players from the 2023 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard as a starting point, analyses clusters of R&D intensity, examines past financial performance and analyses participation in start-ups via corporate venturing. Show less
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Economic complexity and the sustainability transition: A review of data, methods, and literature
Economic Complexity (EC) methods have gained increasing popularity across fields and disciplines. In particular, the EC toolbox has proved particularly promising… Show more in the study of complex and interrelated phenomena, such as the transition towards a greener economy. Using the EC approach, scholars have been investigating the relationship between EC and sustainability, proposing to identify the distinguishing characteristics of green products and to assess the readiness of productive and technological structures for the sustainability transition. This article proposes to review and summarize the data, methods, and empirical literature that are relevant to the study of the sustainability transition from an EC perspective. We review three distinct but connected blocks of literature on EC and environmental sustainability. First, we survey the evidence linking measures of EC to indicators related to environmental sustainability. Second, we review articles that strive to assess the green competitiveness of productive systems. Third, we examine evidence on green technological development and its connection to non-green knowledge bases. Finally, we summarize the findings for each block and identify avenues for further research in this recent and growing body of empirical literature. Show less
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Covid-19 and the resilience of European firms
Using EIBIS data, this paper shows how firms with higher productivity, before the pandemic, were less likely to cut employment… Show more during the crisis, while the adoption of digital technologies was led by firms that were already relatively advanced digital users. Past research suggests that economic crisis lead to a reallocation of resources from less productive to more productive firms, with many firms taking action to boost their own productivity. This paper uses data from the EIB Investment Survey and the ORBIS database to analyse how the COVID-19 crisis affected the level of employment and digitalisation efforts of European firms. Moreover, it examines how these changes relate to the pre-crisis performance of firms, in terms of productivity, digitalisation and growth. It finds that firms were less likely to reduce their number of employees, both in the short and in the long term, if they exhibited higher productivity or higher growth, or were in highly digitalised sectors. It also finds that firms were more likely to increase their use of digital technologies during the crisis if they were already relatively advanced users of digital technologies. Show less
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Which European firms were hardest hit by COVID-19?
The COVID-19 shock hit firms hard, on average. This paper uses graphical techniques and quantile regression to analyse the effect… Show more of the shock across the distribution of firms. The COVID-19 shock had a strong negative effect on aggregate economic performance, with the average firm taking a hit on sales revenues and financial performance. However, the effects varied from firm to firm. Were already-struggling firms hit hardest, threatening their very survival? Or did the COVID-19 shock disproportionately deter tomorrow’s superstars at the upper end of the distribution, thus sacrificing future growth potential? This paper investigates where the COVID-19 shock hit the firm growth distribution, using graphical techniques and quantile regressions to analyse the full distribution of firm growth rates. We investigate how the COVID-19 shock relates to growth outcomes for four dependent variables: growth of sales, value added, employment, and labour productivity. Our results confirm that COVID-19 policy support reached its intended recipients. Show less
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PDF Assessing Open Strategic Autonomy
The objective of this report is to help increase the EU's open strategic autonomy (OSA) by providing data that help… Show more monitor and take steps to achieve OSA in the innovation and production domains. The report operationalises the concept and provides empirical insights into the current situation. It finds that the EU’s digital sector has obvious vulnerabilities that impair its OSA, most prominently in the areas of artificial intelligence and big data. Other areas of innovation also display some vulnerabilities, but which less obviously impair Europe's OSA, at least on the surface. In addition to pure economic dependencies, the changing geopolitical landscape has increased potential vulnerabilities stemming from international collaboration on innovation. Accordingly, increased attention should be paid to latent risks that might produce non-obvious or indirect innovation and production dependency relations in the future. In this respect, the role of the US is particularly critical, as US technologies and firms play a substantial role in innovation processes in Europe. Show less
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Economic Complexity for Regional Industrial Strategies
Innovation and industrial policies in the EU is often undertaken at regional level. Policymakers that have to design regional industrial… Show more strategy need quantitative tools for guidance. Economic complexity can support policymakers especially during the early phase of policy design: patent and trade data are fed into predictive models to assess the chances of success of a strategy. The methods of economic complexity follow the driving principles of machine learning to predict the probability that a region becomes successful in a given technology or product. We present a series of quantitative tools for regions: (1) relative innovation capabilities; (2) expected diversification by sector; (3) expected diversification by product; (4) fitness of a region for a project. Show less
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PDF Europe’s Technology Sovereignty and the Role of Knowledge Diffusion in Global Value Chains
The rise of China as the ‘workshop of the world’, combined with experiences with supply shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic,… Show more have led to a re-assessment in recent years of the dependencies of countries on foreign sources of technology. This study seeks to contribute to this discussion by analysing technology dependency in a global value-chain framework. We employ input-output and R&D investment data to assess how dependency on imported R&D inputs has developed over the last decade. Our results indicate that there has been no general trend towards greater technological dependency on foreign R&D. In the last decade, the share of imported R&D in total R&D increased in around half of the countries in the analysis and remained unchanged in the United States and in the EU-27. Both the EU-27 and United States show comparable levels of dependency on foreign sources of technology. At industry level, low-tech sectors revealed the highest rates of dependency on foreign sources of technology. The data also confirm that dependency on China for imported R&D has at least doubled in most countries over the last decade. China, in contrast, was able to reduce its own dependence on foreign sources of technology in the past decade dependency due to fast-growing domestic R&D investments. In addition, regional integration in technology flows between Asian countries is much greater today than it was 10 years ago. Show less
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A resilient, competitive and fair EU: Industrial Innovation for Open Strategic Autonomy
This article gives a short EU policy contextualisation of “Industrial innovation for Open Strategic Autonomy – leaving no one and… Show more no place behind’’ followed by a digest of the results of CONCORDi 2023 conference (Oct. 24-26, 2023) on the same subject. It focusses on policy relevance, drawing on new scientific evidence, insights and recommendations highlighting some of the policy challenges ahead. The content of this document – original for its comprehensive and new science-to-policy handling of the topic - reinforces the messages related to Open Strategic Autonomy of recent Communications of the Commission.Main highlights arising from this Brief are: 1) Industrial Innovation as a pillar of industrial policy is central to achieving Open Strategic Autonomy (OSA); 2) In pursuing OSA, social and territorial cohesion should be integrated into industrial innovation policy; 3) Institutional capacities as well as quality and good governance are crucial to OSA; 4) More research and cooperation between practitioners and scientists is needed to underpin and monitor OSA. Show less
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Industrial Innovation for Open Strategic Autonomy - leaving no one and no place behind
This working paper sets the scene and provides background information on 'Industrial Innovation for Open Strategic Autonomy”, the main focus… Show more of the 9th edition of the European Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation (CONCORDi 2023), as well as introduces scientific contributions that will be presented at the conference. It thus aims to stimulate fruitful discussion between academia, experts and policy-makers at the conference, identifying potential policy initiatives and areas where additional research and evidence are needed. Show less