Publications
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PDF Explaining Growth Differences across Firms: The Interplay between Innovation and Management Practices
This paper provides first empirical evidence of the joint effects that innovation strategies and human resource management practices exert on… Show more firm growth. By exploiting unique information from a large sample of Italian manufacturing companies in the very recent years, it shows that investing in technology and implementing performance-based pay policies are both positively associated with a significant turnover, employment and labor productivity growth premium. However, their joint adoption does not necessarily sum the two effects. In particular, performance-based rewards boost growth of non-innovators and of firms pursuing relatively simple innovation strategies, centered around the acquisition of embodied technology. For firms strongly relying on R&D as an additional lever for product and process upgrading, the estimated effect of having in place monetary incentive mechanisms is null or even negative. Show less
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PDF Inward greenfield FDI and patterns of job polarization
The unprecedented growth in FDI in the last decades has caused drastic changes in the labour markets of the host… Show more countries. The major part of FDI takes place in low tech industries, where the wages and skills are low, or in high tech, where they offer a wage premium for the highly skilled workers. This mechanism may increase the polarization of employment into high-wage and low-wage jobs, at the expenses of middle-skill jobs. This paper looks at the effects of two types of FDI inflows, namely foreign investment in high-skill and low-skill activities, on skill polarization. We match data on greenfield FDI aggregated by country and sector with data on employment by occupational skill to investigate the extent to which differ types of greenfield FDI are responsible for skill polarization. Show less
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PDF From R&D to market: using trademarks to capture the market capability of top R&D investors
This paper investigates the links between the market capability of top corporate R&D investors (EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboards), as… Show more captured by trademark data and their economic performance in terms of net sales growth. It provides empirical evidence to better understand the extent to which companies, operating in different industrial sectors, combine technological capabilities with commercialization efforts to generate and appropriate the economic returns of their R&D investments. This paper shows how different dimensions of firms' market capabilities can be captured through trademark indicators. The results suggest that complementing R&D efforts and patenting activities with strong and specific market capabilities can indeed yield significant growth premiums. Moreover, offering services seems to pay off depending on the intensity of R&D investments. Yet, a quantile regression approach and a series of robustness checks indicate that such effects differ across the quantiles of the conditional sales growth distribution. Show less
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PDF The 2018 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard
The 2018 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 2017/18. These companies, based in 46 countries, each invested over €25 million in R&D for a total of €736.4bn which is approximately 90% of the world's business-funded R&D. They include 577 EU companies accounting for 27% of the total, 778 US companies for 37%, 339 Japanese companies for 14%, 438 Chinese for 10% and 368 from the rest-of-the-world (RoW) for 12%. Show less
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PDF Innovation and Industry: Policy for the next decade
This document contributes to the discussion on the post-2020 policies that will start with the next EU multiannual financial perspectives… Show more and the subsequent preparation of the ninth Framework Programme (FP9). We identify seven major challenges posed by the industrial transformation. These challenges will shape the future economic landscape and should be at the heart of the next generation policies. Four main ingredients are proposed for future EU policies: they should i) be based on (truly) new policy vision, aims and objectives; ii) promote coordination, simplification and openness; iii) target EU specificities; and iv) embody experimentation. Show less
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PDF Does manufacturing stir up innovation?
Because of its positive contribution to employment and economic growth, the EU has set a manufacturing target of 20% of… Show more GDP. This could also boost R&D, productivity and exporting. Our analyses do not find empirical evidence that a large manufacturing sector has a direct influence on exporting activity or productivity growth. We find a positive association between manufacturing and R&D investment. The EU manufacturing strategy could help reaching the 3% R&D intensity target. However, the link between manufacturing and R&D depends on the industrial structure of a country. Support to new high-tech sectors should be coupled with actions to encourage technological upgrade in existing ones. Show less
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PDF Smart Specialisation, seizing new industrial opportunities
This study offers a novel analytical approach to inform the regional search for new industrial opportunities, as promoted by Smart… Show more Specialisation within the EU Cohesion policy context. The analysis departs from the challenges of practicing Smart Specialisation and its entrepreneurial discovery process in a dynamic perspective. It argues that the adoption of a dynamic approach to identify new opportunities implies mapping regional business and innovation assets as well as, assessing their position within the global technological and industrial landscape. The report brings a case study of the Lombardy region business environment, spurring from the S3 Lab initiative (in collaboration with Baden-Württemberg, Catalonia and Lapland), together with a comparative analysis focusing on technological development. The empirical study combines patent data from OECD REGPAT and territorial proprietary micro-data from Lombardy region on firm creation in emerging industries (EI) – new industrial sectors or existing sectors evolving into new industries (European Cluster Observatory). These industries represent a priority area for Lombardy's innovation-led development strategy. The initial observations confirm the importance of such industries in the region; they represent more than one-third of employment, almost a half of the regional value-added and feature together the majority of innovative start-ups, suggesting the relevance of the regional strategic development choices. Also, in terms of productive advantages, Lombardy ranks high in some key EI. The mapping of technological competences through patent indicators measuring specialisation, diversification and the ability to specialise in fast-growing and niche fields gives relevant insights on the technological potential of the region, providing further guidance for better targeted interventions. Show less
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PDF The impact of multinational R&D spending firms on job polarization and mobility
This report analyses the role of multinational R&D intensive firms in job polarization. It also investigates how these firms affect… Show more the labour market in terms of wage growth and labour mobility. Firms appearing on the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard account for a significant share of economic activity in Denmark measured by employment, innovation activity, and R&D expenditures. Domestic firms listed on the scoreboard are the largest and most innovative, but subsidiaries of foreign scoreboard firms are still larger and more innovative compared to non-scoreboard firms. Relying on information from register data the report demonstrates that R&D spending among scoreboard firms is a complement to high skill jobs, while it substitutes low skill jobs. Thus, scoreboard firms are more involved in upgrading than polarization. Organisational change has an effect similar to that of R&D, while there is indication that innovation is a complement for low skilled jobs. Labour flows, particularly of high skilled workers, are stronger among scoreboard firms than between scoreboard firms and other firms. Thus, labour flows in networks instead of appearing in labour market pools, and non-scoreboard firms are kept out of the "knowledge spill-over" loops, providing them with fewer opportunities to learn from the scoreboard firms. Show less
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PDF R&D and Innovation across Global Value Chains: Insights for EU Territorial Innovation Policy
Firms organise innovation activities across a wider range of geographically dispersed and specialized units, as compared to previous decades. Moreover… Show more corporate innovation processes are broken up into ever finer stages and tasks at the global scale. The global dispersion of R&D and innovation activities occurs at a higher pace and goes hand in hand with a stronger regional polarization. Yet, corporate R&D remains a domestic activity, although functional and industry-specific patterns can be observed. The increased internationalisation of R&D and innovation activities does not imply the hollowing-out of domestic ones. Foreign innovation activities may actually support domestic increases in innovation. The internal and external connections of national and regional systems matter for their innovation performance. The quality of the regional learning and innovation systems is important to attract "relevant activities or segments" of the GVC. On the other hand, better connecting regions to the global innovation network is important for local growth and employment. The extent to which firms co-locate production and innovation activities depends on industry, product and process-specificities. Evidence is needed on how R&D and innovation activities are sliced and diced across GVCs, on how these global corporate dynamics interact with national and regional innovation systems and on how they impact on local growth and employment. Show less
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PDF World Corporate Top R&D Investors: Industrial Property Strategies in the Digital Economy
The speed, scale and scope of the digital transformation make it hard to fully apprehend the breadth and depth of… Show more the changes brought about by this new technological paradigm. Such a difficult exercise is nevertheless fundamental for evidence-based policies aiming at addressing the challenges and leveraging the opportunities that going digital may offer, while making the digital transformation societally enhancing and inclusive. The present report constitutes an effort in this respect and looks at the innovation-related investment and activities performed by market leaders worldwide to identify their technological trajectories. It shines a new light on the digital transformation and on the strategies pursued by top innovators worldwide to generate knowledge and to appropriate the returns from their knowledge-based investment through industrial property (IP) rights. Special attention is devoted to uncovering the extent to which information and communication technologies and activities are diffusing and have been adopted by actors operating in other technological and economic domains. To access the EC-JRC/OECD COR&DIP© database, v.1. 2017 (raw data provided in flat files), please fill in the on-line form at: Access to COR&DIP© Show less