Publications
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PDF Innovation, competitiveness and growth without R&D? Analysis of corporate R&D investment - A country approach: Italy
The objective of this policy brief is to analyse the status of private R&D investment in Italy based on recent… Show more evidence and to indicate possible policy actions to boost private R&D investment. For our analysis, we rely on microdata from an unbalanced 10 years' panel data-set (2004-2013), built using several waves of the European Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. Moreover, we also take into consideration other sources of quantitative and qualitative information (e.g. OECD, ISTAT, EUROSTAT, ERAWATCH Country Report Italy 2013, State of the Innovation Union 2014), and recent academic literature on the topic. In this document we argue that: i) innovation in firms' without their engagement in R&D activities is not sustainable in the medium and long term; ii) the Italian R&D and innovation (and competitiveness) gap is due to 'systemic'/structural reasons and thus targeted high quality policies are needed to address these issues; iii) such policy interventions will have little positive impact without comprehensive reform aimed at improving the innovation environment as a whole. Careful design of an 'innovation strategy' that includes support for R&D is needed. This strategy should be fine-tuned to tackle the actual specificities of the Italian economic context and its R&D-led innovation difficulties. Show less
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PDF Boosting the EU Attractiveness to International R&D Investments: What matters? What works?
The Policy Brief discusses recent evidence on patterns and trends in the internationalisation of EU corporate R&D activities and the… Show more factors which drive location choices. This evidence suggests that boosting international investment in R&D activities requires a combination of policy measures aimed at enhancing the knowledge base of locations, and investment promotion policies tailored to investors from different countries. The policy mix should include measures aiming at improving the efficiency of national and regional innovation systems, particularly through: a) Increasing the quality of education systems and skills, to enable the emergence of centres of research excellence, b) Facilitating the clustering of R&D activities, given the importance of proximity for knowledge spillovers. Show less
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PDF How do companies 'perceive' their intangibles? New statistical evidence from the INNOBAROMETER 2013
The report provides a statistical analysis of the way European companies have shown to perceive their Intangibles in the recent… Show more Innobarometer 2013. The report is intended to complement the evidence presented in the FLASH EUROBAROMETER 369 ("Investing in Intangibles") with a deeper investigation of both the characteristics of the available micro-data and the regularities emerging from their statistical analysis. A special focus is placed on the extent to which companies perceive their intangibles as strategic and on that to which the relative investment interplay with their innovative projects. The role of context conditions vs. that of business incentives in motivating their intangible investments is also addressed. Show less
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PDF Financing R&D and Innovation for Corporate Growth. What new evidence should policymakers know?
The Policy Brief addresses the results of a recent European Conference on the Financing R&D and Innovation (CONCORDi-2013: http://iri.jrc.ec.europa.eu/concord/2013/index.html). It… Show more presents recent empirical evidence on the topic and attempts to draw a number of policy-relevant messages to be brought to the attention of policymakers, as well as open questions requiring further research to address policy needs. Show less
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PDF The 2014 Survey on R&D Investment Business Trends
This report contains the main findings of the ninth European Commission survey on industrial research and development (R&D) investment trends.… Show more It analyses the responses of 186 mainly very large enterprises from a subsample of 1 000 EU-based companies in the 2013 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. These 186 companies invested almost € 60 billion in R&D from their own resources, corresponding to 36 % of the total R&D investment by the 1 000 EU Scoreboard companies. The main findings are as follows: The main conclusion is that the responding companies expect R&D investment to increase by on average 4.2 % per year during 2014–16. This is about 50 % higher than the increase anticipated in the previous survey (2.6 %) and mainly reflects the shift in expectations in the automobiles and parts sector, which returns to the level of previous years (4.6 %) after last year's reported stagnation (–0.4 %). Activities related to Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) are highly diverse and often concentrated among few companies, mainly from high and medium R&D-intensity sectors. The 166 companies which provided information make one-fifth of their R&D outside the EU. The largest share of R&D investment made outside the EU is in the United States and Canada (8.4 %), followed by China (4.3 %), the rest of the world (3.6 %), India (1.9 %), other European countries (1.6 %) and Japan (1.2 %). The responding companies' expectations for R&D investment for the next three years show the ongoing participation of European companies in the global economy. While maintaining the focus of their R&D investment in the EU, they reap opportunities for growth in emerging economies. Two out of three of the responding EU-based companies consider their home country the most attractive location for R&D. The United States, Germany, China and India are the most attractive locations mentioned outside the home country. Human resources, knowledge-sharing and proximity to other company sites are the criteria that make countries attractive for R&D activity. For the countries where companies have the greatest R&D activity, the criteria most influencing attractiveness were said to be R&D personnel in the labour market (quality, quantity and labour costs), knowledge-sharing and collaboration opportunities (with universities and public research organisations) and proximity (to other company sites, technology poles and incubators, and suppliers). In a separate comparison of attractiveness factors among R&D sites within the EU, quality of R&D personnel and knowledge-sharing opportunities with universities and public organisations are by far the most frequently stated in the top three. Comparing R&D attractiveness factors within the EU with those for the United States, the 38 respondents point to knowledge-sharing opportunities and quality and quantity of R&D personnel as the leading factors for both world regions. Comparing R&D attractiveness factors within the EU with those for China and India, the 13 respondents reveal significant differences between the two world areas. R&D within the company is the most important component of innovation, followed by market research, product demonstration and training to support innovation activities. Show less
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PDF The patenting activity of the top IRI Scoreboard Companies: an introductory note
The present note contains an explorative, introductory analysis of the patenting activity exhibited by the top 100 companies of the… Show more IRI Scoreboard, and intends to identify strengths and weaknesses for its possible future extension to the whole Scoreboard. With respect to these companies, patent data are drawn from Patstat, on the basis of which patent families are built up, and crossed with other data on their R&D investments. Both the R&D and the patent applications of the investigated sample of companies increase over time. At the same time, important sector specificities in the R&D-patent relationship have been found. The analysis of the technological competences of the overall sample yields promising results. A first examination of the IPC classes of the patent applications suggests a certain concentration in the kind of technological knowledge that companies master. The analysis of the knowledge base and, more specifically, the companies' involvement in the creation of key enabling technologies (KETs) also highlights that important sector specificities go along with firm-specific factors. All in all, "augmenting" the Scoreboard data with company level patent information appears to be an interesting extension to be pursued. Show less
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PDF Innovation and Productivity in Services: Evidence from Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom
This paper examines the links between innovation and productivity in service enterprises. For this purpose, we use micro data from… Show more the Community Innovation Survey 2008 in Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom, and estimate an augmented structural model. Our results indicate that innovation in service enterprises is linked to higher productivity. In all three countries analysed, among the innovation types that we consider, the strongest link between innovation and productivity was found for marketing innovations. Our empirical evidence highlights the importance of internationalisation in the context of innovation outputs in all three countries. The determinants of innovation in service enterprises appear remarkably similar to the determinants of innovation in manufacturing enterprises. Show less
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PDF Intangible investments and innovation propensity. Evidence from the Innobarometer 2013
This paper investigates the innovation impact of intangibles by considering the decision of firms to invest in a comprehensive set… Show more of them. By using a new survey on a large sample of firms in 28 EU (plus 8 non-EU) countries, we first identify the principal components of the resources firms invest in six kinds of intangibles. Their contribution to the firms' propensity to introduce new products and/or processes is then estimated with a two-step model, which addresses the endogeneity of the focal regressors through theoretically consistent instruments. A firm's innovativeness depends on its choice of using internal vs. external resources for its intangible investments more than on their actual amount, and on the kind of assets these investments are directed to. Intangibles need to be managed strategically in order to have an innovation impact and the policy support of this type of investment must take this strategic use into account. Show less
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PDF The hidden costs of R&D collaboration
Many European policy initiatives continue to promote R&D collaboration in view of its expected benefits. Despite the advantages of R&D… Show more cooperation, to benefit from it, firms must create a structure to support the efficient transfer of knowledge-based assets. In fact, the set-up and administration of common resources might be costly. This paper derives the distribution of the costs associated with R&D collaboration, as they could shape firms' R&D-related investments. To ascertain these costs, we model the expected benefits from R&D cooperation with a structural dynamic monopoly model. The modelling results show that the sunk costs of innovation are lower when collaborating with a research partner, and that a firm's probability of investing in R&D or innovation increases with the level of productivity increase expected from collaborating in R&D and innovation. We also find that the sunk costs of innovation are 1.5 to 3 times lower than the sunk costs of R&D. Additionally, it can be seen that the suggested structural framework of a firm's heterogeneity in cost functions used in our model can offer a straightforward extension to existing policy impact evaluation. Show less
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PDF On the R&D giants' shoulders: Do FDI help to stand on them?
The paper investigates the extent to which outward FDI affect the MNC's capacity of entering (and remaining in) the club… Show more of top R&D world investors, benefiting from performance gains in both financial and economic markets. By merging the European Industrial Research and Innovation Scoreboard with the fDi Markets dataset, we find supporting evidence. Increasing the number of FDI projects helps firms overcome the discontinuities that, in the distribution of R&D expenditures, separate the group of the largest world R&D investors from the top of them. The same is true for the number of FDI projects in R&D, which are also more important than greater FDI portfolios in becoming a top R&D spender. Furthermore, unlike FDI in general, more FDI in R&D guarantee firms to remain in this top club of firms as it increases their capacity of resisting competition for a place among the top R&D spenders. Results at the extensive margin (i.e. the number of FDI projects) are confirmed with respect to the scale of FDI projects (i.e. at the intensive margin). However, increasing their size is not enough to become one of the higest ranking R&D firms. Policy implications about the support to R&D internationalisation are drawn accordingly. Show less