Publications
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PDF Global race for robotisation – Looking at the entire robotisation chain
Where does Europe stand in the global robotisation race? This paper aims to answer this question by developing a novel… Show more theoretical and analytical framework which applies the concept of a global value chain to robotisation. By doing this, we investigate in detail the entire robotisation chain, from robotics developers to robot manufacturers, and companies that deploy industrial robots. For the research and development (R&D)-intensive part of the chain (robotics development), we analyse the robotics patent data of the Worldwide Patent Statistical Database (PATSTAT) combined with ORBIS, while for the capital-intensive part (deployment of robots), our information is sourced from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). Our results show that although the ‘big five’ (Europe, USA, China, Japan, and Korea) dominate the global robotisation landscape they do not all hold equally strong positions across the whole robotisation chain. Japan and Korea are the early first-movers and today’s global leaders, as they are robustly engaged in every part of the chain. Europe is very strong in robot manufacturing and robot deployment, but is behind global leaders in robotics development. The USA has its firm competitive advantages in robotics development, while at present the latecomer China is a rival only in the industrial deployment of robots. Nevertheless, in Europe, some smaller and advanced economies are specialising in certain parts of the robotisation chain, as Austria, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden are performing well in robotics development; not only this, Belgium, Italy, and Spain are making extensive use of industrial robots for various kinds of manufacturing. European economies which are lagging behind the rest – largely consisting of Central and Eastern European countries – are involved in the robotisation chain only insofar as they are involved in robot deployment. Since there are only 43 countries globally who are taking part in robotisation, the eminent policy challenge remains to find ways for countries to become integrated into the robotisation chain, and for those countries already engaged in robotisation, the main focus is to create policies which support upgrading across the chain, as the reshoring of previously offshored production becomes more prevalent. Show less
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Asbestos, leaded petrol, and other aberrations: Comparing countries’ regulatory responses to disapproved products and technologies
Industrial innovation churns out increasingly unnatural products and technologies amid scientific uncertainty about their harmful effects. We argue that a… Show more quick regulatory response to the discovery that certain innovations are harmful is an important indicator for evaluating the performance of an innovation system. Using a unique hand-collected dataset, we explore the temporal geography of regulatory responses as evidenced by the years in which countries introduce bans against leaded petrol, asbestos, DDT, smoking in public places, and plastic bags, as well as introducing the driver’s seatbelt obligation. We find inconsistent regulatory responses by countries across different threats, and that countries’ level of economic development is often not a good predictor of early bans. Moreover, an early introduction of one ban is not strongly related to the relative performance in regard to another ban, which raises possible questions about the coherence of regulatory responses across different threats. Show less
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Economic Complexity for competitiveness and innovation: a novel bottom-up strategy linking global and regional capacities
EU manufacturing has lost ground due to the low growth of the EU domestic economy and its diminished participation in… Show more global manufacturing value chains. EU industry is facing different transitions at the same time, including the digital transformation and the transition towards a net zero emission and circular economy. Developing technologies, products and solutions for this while having access to finance, resources and human capital equipped with the right skills are amongst the huge challenges to be overcome in the next decade. This implies the need for new business models and actors to ensure future competitiveness and employment. These competitive pressures challenge the EU as leading innovator in the world, which in turn is crucial for future industrial competitiveness. From the policy side, a more integrated approach to industrial, innovation and regional policies is necessary to trigger successful industrial transformation. In this environment, conventional economic analyses have shown limited usefulness. Indeed, Complex System analysis has highlighted since the '80s the limitation of conventional economic analyses to identify hidden trends in complex environments (Anderson, Arrow and Pines 1987). Economic Complexity is an alternative, non-conventional bottom-up and data-driven approach inspired by statistical physics and complex systems science. By producing quantitative, falsifiable results and relationships, it has great potential in the analysis of the current challenges in Innovation Systems. Show less
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PDF Investigating the capabilities and the competitiveness of the EU visà-vis its main competitors in developing civilian technologies with critical spillovers into the defence
This study proposes a framework for investigating the relevance of dual use inventions, i.e., military applications of civilian patents. The… Show more data collected extends the companion report that focused on the opposite direction of dual use: from military inventions to civilian applications (Caviggioli et al., 2018). The analyses focus on 10 million patent families from selected patent offices in the years 2002-2015. The method proposed identified 85,034 defence inventions (0.9%) that were compared with the civilian inventions along several dimensions (time, geography, technological clusters). This study operationalises dual use from both a civilian to a military application (CM dual use) and in the opposite direction (MC dual use). The presence of CM dual inventions is 1.4% of the total civilian sample, with a slightly decreasing trend. They are four times the MCs in absolute numbers. The geographical analysis reveals heterogeneity: the US is the origin of 58.7% of the total dual use inventions identified in the sample and shows the highest incidence of cases (4.7% of all civilian inventions). The results also indicate significant heterogeneity in the share of domestic knowledge flows. The domestic spillover for dual in most of the countries examined is lower than for non-dual: a military application of a civilian innovation is a relatively more frequent occurrence outside the borders of the country with the exceptions of the USA, France, and the Russian Federation. The share of domestic CM dual use in the EU28 area is 36%, smaller than the corresponding non-dual value (42%). Show less
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PDF The 2019 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard
The 2019 edition of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard) comprises the 2500 companies investing the largest sums… Show more in R&D in the world in 2018/19. These companies, based in 44 countries, each invested over €30 million in R&D for a total of €823.4bn which is approximately 90% of the world’s business-funded R&D. They include 551 EU companies accounting for 25% of the total, 769 US companies for 38%, 318 Japanese companies for 13%, 507 Chinese for 12% and 355 from the rest-of-the-world (RoW) for 12%. This report analyses the main changes in companies' R&D and economic indicators over the past year and their performance over the past ten years. It also includes patent-based analyses aimed at characterising further the R&D efficiency of the business health sector and the activity of the Scoreboard companies in the field of environmental technologies. Show less
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PDF The 2019 EU Survey on Industrial R&D Investment Trends
The 131 EU companies participating in this year's EU Survey expect R&D investments to increase by 4.6% per year in… Show more 2019 and 2020. This is slightly below the 5.4% that was expected last year, but still high in a historic perspective. Companies in the 'Health industries' and 'ICT producers' sectors expect their R&D to increase most. Ninety percent of all participating companies have both environmental and social sustainability policies in place, while the rest plans to do so in the coming 5 years. Due to European Green Deal and climate action priority of the Commission, this year's survey asked participating firms on the sustainability efforts of their companies. Companies that had environmental sustainability policies in place also had social sustainability policies in place (and vice versa). Only two companies indicated to not have either an environmental or social sustainability in place and nor is planning to implement this within the coming five years. Sustainable technologies are considered among the most relevant technologies to remain competitive in the future. Together with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data, these technologies have been identified as most relevant for future competitiveness. While sustainability technologies are specifically relevant for companies from sectors that have a big impact on the environment (either as provider or supplier of sustainable solutions), AI and Big Data are expected to have a positive impact on competitiveness in a wide range of sectors. Health and Industrials invest the smallest proportion of net sales in environmental sustainability. Companies from the ICT sectors have the highest environmental sustainability intensity. While the average R&D intensity of all participants to the survey is 3.5%, this environmental sustainability intensity is 1.0%. Only less than half of the companies provided an estimation of the company's investments in environmental sustainability indicating that still many companies do not keep track of this information or find it difficult to provide even a rough estimate. This year’s expectations on the impact of Brexit on R&D strategies are much more negative than last year. The proportion of firms expecting no impact decreased from 52% to 37% while the group that expects a relevant impact on their R&D strategies multiplied from 4% to 16%. Especially the firms that responded last year that the impact depended on the negotiations turned more negative, with almost half of them expecting now a relevant impact, clearly indicating of how the situation has evolved over the last year. This information was gathered during the period March-June 2019, during which the insecurities about the implementation of the Brexit process increased significantly. 72% of all R&D is performed within the EU, which is similar to previous editions. This proportion has been stable since many years, still not showing any sign of erosion or offshoring the R&D base to other regions. In fact, the absolute amount of R&D within the EU is foreseen to grow the coming two years by 2.5% per year, from €25 to €26 billion, while the proportion of firms with R&D activities in all four of the main regions (EU, US, Asia and RoW) remains very high. For the first time since the start of the survey, R&D investment growth in China is expected to be single-digit (8.1% compared to 21.3% in the previous survey). The highest R&D increase in percentage points is expected in India (+10.4%, similar to last year). This year, with "only" a foreseen increase of 8.1%, this is the lowest foreseen increase since the start of the survey but still well above the average expected R&D growth. One out of nine companies in this survey performs R&D in only one country – in line with last year's survey. All of these firms perform their R&D exclusively in the country of the headquarters. The headquarters’ country remains an important location to perform for companies with international R&D activities: almost 80% of the firms have their main R&D location in the country of the headquarters and perform a higher proportion of their R&D in this location than firms with their main R&D location outside the company’s HQ (68% vs 42%). The US is the most popular R&D location for the top EU R&D performers that participated in this survey, followed by Germany and China. Almost half of the participants performs R&D activities in the US. For Germany and China, this is around one third of the companies. Within the EU, Germany is followed by the UK, France and Sweden. Show less
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PDF Robotization in Central and Eastern Europe: catching up or dependence
While in the most developed European countries the combination of fallingrobotpricesandhighwagesboostsrobotization,thesedriving factors do not sufficiently explain why we are experiencing… Show more today a sharp increase in deployment of industrial robots in European countries with low wages. Particularly, in Central and Eastern Europe where a decade ago industrial robots were almost nonexistent but today more than 30,000 robots are at work. Hence this paper, by recalculating the data of International Federation of Robotics and EU-KLEMS addresses the main question: What drives and hinders the robotization in Central and Eastern Europe? Show less
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Financial constraints and intangible investments. Do innovative and non-innovative firms differ?
We investigate the extent to which financial constraints hamper the firms’ investment in intangibles. Drawing on the extant literature, we… Show more maintain that a distinction should be kept between innovators and non-innovators. Moreover, we argue that such a distinction should be investigated along the whole spectrum of intangibles firms invest and by addressing the risks of reverse causality and simultaneity bias in the relationship. Through an original quasi-panel extension of a recent European Innobarometer survey, we estimate two sets of recursive bivariate probit models – for innovative and non-innovative firms’ investments – from which interesting results emerge. Financial barriers hamper the investment of both kinds of firms only for R&D, design, and organisation and business processes. With respect to other intangibles, instead, financial barriers act only on innovators (or non-innovators) or are even absent. Furthermore, the hampering role of financial barriers distributes differently across different intangibles between innovators and non-innovators. Show less
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Labor mobility from R&D-intensive multinational companies: Implications for knowledge and technology
Private sector R&D is largely concentrated in a few multinational companies (MNCs), which thus play an important role in the… Show more creation of knowledge and technology in the economy. The mobility of labor between these firms and the rest of the economy is therefore an important mechanism for the diffusion of knowledge. This paper analyses in great detail the flow of labor between firms with specific emphasis on flows to and from R&D intensive MNCs. Using linked employer-employee data for Denmark, we match employees moving from R&D intensive MNCs to other employees switching jobs. We find that employees are more inclined to move between R&D intensive MNCs and their subsidiaries rather than between these firms and other firms in the economy. This is particularly true for high skill employees. Our results suggest that other domestic firms are to a larger extent kept out of the ‘knowledge spillover’ loop, which provide them with fewer opportunities to learn from the R&D intensive MNCs. In other words, R&D intensive MNCs and their subsidiaries form a kind of sub labor market within the national labor market; employees exhibit higher mobility within this group of firms than between this group and the rest of the labor market. Show less
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Industrial innovation for transformation: New science & policy insights
This article introduces the main challenges, the latest scientific evidence and policy issues, and the science and policy areas for… Show more industrial innovation to be further developed, and the role of industrial innovation in sustainability and prosperity in Europe. New innovations and integrated production structures need updated management practices. Territorial and economic disparities and the performance heterogeneity of firms depend on the differences in innovation diffusion and adoption rates. Mixed consequences on the labour force and structural inequalities arise out of advanced digitalisation, while sustainable technologies may have a significant positive impact on employment and industrial composition. Disruptive transformative EU policies should be set up to trigger the exploration of innovation with the highest possible economic, social, and employment returns. These should also be able to attract industrial investment. Show less