Publications
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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 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
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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 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 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 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 "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