|
on Innovation |
| By: | Paolo Carioli; Dirk Czarnitzki; Christian Rammer |
| Abstract: | We investigate the effects of different channels of industry-science collaboration on new product sales at the firm-level and whether government subsidies for collaboration make a difference. We distinguish four collaboration channels: joint R&D, consulting/contract research, IP licensing, human resource transfer. Employing firm-level panel data from the German Community Innovation Survey and a conditional difference-in-differences methodology, we find a positive effect of industry-science collaboration on product innovation success only for joint R&D, but not for the other three channels. The positive effect is limited to subsidized collaboration. Our results suggest that government subsidies are required to bring firms and public science into forms of collaboration that are effective in producing higher innovation output. |
| Keywords: | Industry-science collaboration, transfer channels, product innovation, treatment effects analysis |
| Date: | 2024–10–23 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ete:msiper:751257 |
| By: | Aakash Kalyani (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis); Nicholas Bloom (Stanford University); Marcela Carvalho (Harvard University); Tarek Hassan (Boston University); Josh Lerner (Harvard University); Ahmed Tahoun (London Business School) |
| Abstract: | We identify phrases associated with novel technologies using textual analysis of patents, job postings, and earnings calls, enabling us to identify four stylized facts on the diffusion of jobs relating to new technologies. First, the development of economically impactful new technologies is geographically highly concentrated, more so even than overall patenting: 56% of the most economically impactful technologies come from just two U.S. locations, Silicon Valley and the Northeast Corridor. Second, as the technologies mature and the number of related jobs grows, hiring spreads geographically. But this process is very slow, taking around 50 years to disperse fully. Third, while initial hiring in new technologies is highly skill biased, over time the mean skill level in new positions declines, drawing in an increasing number of lower-skilled workers. Finally, the geographic spread of hiring is slowest for higher-skilled positions, with the locations where new technologies were pioneered remaining the focus for the technology's high-skill jobs for decades. |
| Keywords: | Employment, Geography, Innovation, R and D |
| JEL: | O31 O32 |
| Date: | 2024–06–22 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:thk:wpaper:inetwp222 |
| By: | David Hémous; Simon Lepot; Thomas Sampson; Julian Schärer |
| Abstract: | Intellectual property rights are a recurrent source of tensions between developed and developing economies. This paper provides the first quantitative analysis of optimal patent policy in trading economies. We develop a new model of trade, growth and patenting in which patent protection affects both innovation and market power. The model is estimated using data on patent applications to calibrate patent protection by country and the geography of innovation. Counterfactual analysis yields three main results. First, the potential gains from international cooperation over patent policies are large. However, achieving these gains requires more innovative economies to offer stronger protection. Second, only a small share of these gains has been realized so far. And third, by pushing towards policy harmonization, the TRIPS agreement hurts developing countries without generating global welfare gains. Overall, there is substantial scope for policy reforms to increase efficiency. |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zur:econwp:456 |
| By: | Santiago Caicedo; Jeremy Pearce |
| Abstract: | This paper studies how the speed-quality tradeoff in innovation interacts with firm dynamics, concentration, and economic growth. Empirically, we document long-run trends in the increasing speed of innovation alongside declining quality at large firms. Leveraging variation from an exogenous policy change, we document the existence of the speed-quality tradeoff both at the firm and aggregate level. We develop an endogenous growth model that incorporates the speed-quality tradeoff and show that allocating less labor towards speed increases growth, particularly in the presence of private benefits to innovation and spillovers from heterogeneous innovations. We quantify the model to link firms’ decisions across speed and quality to aggregate outcomes. Quantitatively, the recent growth slowdown is mainly due to changes in the innovation production function, while the allocation of inventors between speed and quality within firms has a modest impact. When spillovers across firms are taken into account, the effect becomes significantly larger; the shift to speed over the last 30 years explains up to one-quarter of the decrease in growth. |
| Keywords: | innovation; economic growth; slowdown; inventors; firm dynamics |
| JEL: | J63 O30 O31 O33 |
| Date: | 2024–10–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fednsr:98928 |
| By: | WOOLFORD Jayne (European Commission - JRC); ESPARZA MASANA Ricard |
| Abstract: | Higher education (HE) is increasingly recognised as a driver of innovation and an actor of change in territorial transformation. Three EU initiatives specifically support the contribution of HE to territorial development and transformative innovation and were analysed to determine the extent of their impact. The impact of the initiatives and projects funded is highly heterogeneous, reflecting distinct territorial, institutional, policy and sectoral contexts across the EU, as well as varying institutional capabilities. |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:iptwpa:jrc139228 |
| By: | Trouvain, Florian |
| JEL: | O |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:vfsc24:302377 |
| By: | Christoph Carnehl; Marco Ottaviani; Justus Preusser |
| Abstract: | This paper overviews the economics of scientific grants, focusing on the interplay between the inherent uncertainty in research, researchers' incentives, and grant design. Grants differ from traditional market systems and other science and innovation policy tools, such as prizes and patents. We outline the main economic forces specific to science, noting the limited attention given to grant funding in the economics literature. Using tools from information economics, we identify key incentive problems at various stages of the grant funding process and offer guidance for effective grant design. In the allocation stage, funders aim to select the highest-merit applications while minimizing evaluation costs. The selection rule, in turn, impacts researchers' incentives to apply and invest in their proposals. In the grant management stage, funders monitor researchers to ensure efficient use of funds. We discuss the advantages and potential pitfalls of (partial) lotteries and emphasize the effectiveness of staged grant design in promoting a productive use of grants. Beyond these broadly applicable insights, our overview highlights the need for further research on grantmaking. Understudied areas include, at the micro level, the interplay of different grant funding stages, and at the macro level, the interaction of grants with other instruments in the market for science. |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2410.12356 |
| By: | João Ferreira do Amaral |
| Abstract: | The purpose of this paper is to study the relations between the concept of technical progress of a certain type (technological wave with technical progress embodied in innovative capital) and the concept of surplus-value of the stock of equipment. For that purpose we define an income function instead of a production function. |
| Keywords: | economic growth; digital revolution; technological progress; innovation. |
| JEL: | E10 E11 E22 N10 O30 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ise:remwps:wp03482024 |
| By: | Lena Abou El-Komboz; Thomas A. Fackler; Moritz Goldbeck; Thomas Fackler |
| Abstract: | Software engineering is prototypical of knowledge work in the digital economy and exhibits strong geographic concentration, with Silicon Valley as the epitome of a tech cluster. We investigate productivity effects of knowledge worker agglomeration. To overcome existing measurement challenges, we track individual contributions in software engineering projects between 2015 and 2021 on GitHub, the by far largest online code repository platform. Our findings demonstrate individual productivity increases by 2.8 percent with a ten percent increase in cluster size, the share of the software engineering community in a technology field located in the same city. Instrumental variable and dynamic estimation results suggest these productivity effects are causal. Productivity gains from cluster size growth are strongest for clusters hosting between 0.67 and 13.5% of a community. We observe a disproportionate activity increase in high-quality, large, and leisure projects and for co-located teams. Overall, software engineers benefit from productivity spillovers due to physical proximity to a large number of peers in their field. |
| Keywords: | high-skilled labor, geography, innovation, peer effects, collaboration |
| JEL: | D62 J24 O33 O36 R32 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11277 |
| By: | Stefan Stremersch; Elke Cabooter; Ivan Guitart (EM - EMLyon Business School); Nuno Camacho |
| Abstract: | Customer insights play a critical role in innovation. In recent years, articles studying customer insights for innovation have risen in marketing and other fields such as innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship. However, the literature on customer insights for innovation grew fragmented and plagued by inconsistent definitions and ambiguity. The literature also lacks a precise classification of different domains of customer insights for innovation. This article offers four key contributions. First, it clearly and consistently defines customer insights for innovation. Second, it proposes a "customer insights process" that describes the activities firms and customer insights intermediaries (e.g., market research agencies) use to generate, disseminate, and apply customer insights for innovation. Third, it offers a synthesis of the knowledge on customer insights for innovation along ten domains of customer insights for innovation: (1) crowdsourcing, (2) co-creating, (3) imagining, (4) observing, (5) testing, (6) intruding, (7) interpreting, (8) organizing, (9) deciding, and (10) tracking. Fourth, the authors qualify and quantify the managerial importance and potential for scholarly research in these domains of customer insights for innovation. They conducted 12 in-depth interviews with executives at market research agencies such as Ipsos, Kantar, Nielsen, IQVIA, and GfK to do so. They surveyed 305 managers working in innovation, marketing, strategy, and customer experience. The article concludes with a research agenda for marketing aimed at igniting knowledge development in high-priority domains for customer insights for innovation. |
| Keywords: | Customer insights, Innovation, Insight generation, Insight dissemination, Insight application, Market research |
| Date: | 2024–10–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04731671 |
| By: | Nicola Giannelli (Department of Economics, Society & Politics, Università di Urbino Carlo Bo) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the European Union's (EU) policy design for regulating Artificial Intelligence (AI), highlighting the comprehensive legislative approach adopted to balance innovation with the protection of fundamental rights. The EU’s AI Act and preceding regulatory efforts emphasize defining AI with flexibility and precision, ensuring transparency, and promoting trustworthiness. Central to this regulatory framework is the emphasis on human agency, technical robustness, privacy, transparency, and accountability. Military and academic use of AI is out of its scope.The paper explores the EU’s dual focus on economic growth and citizen protection, showcasing the role of the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) in shaping ethical guidelines and management processes. By building on existing legislative frameworks, the EU addresses emerging risks and ethical dilemmas, ensuring that AI development aligns with societal values and public trust.1 The approach of the proposal is Risk-Based on the side human protection and market building on the side of innovation. The bill is 459 pages Act of Parliament that cannot be enforced without a lot of help from legal services. This should come a network of regulatory agencies, one for each member state, with an AI Office of the Commission at the European Level. Sandboxes that want to simulate the compliance of any new system with regulation framework will become necessary, like other legal counseling, for firms that want to avoid to be blocked in a Kafkian procedure. |
| Keywords: | Artificial Intelligence; European Union; Regulation Policy; Risk Management |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:urb:wpaper:24_02 |
| By: | Andrea Ascani (Gran Sasso Science Institute); Lakshmi Balachandran Nair (LUISS Guido Carli University) |
| Abstract: | Whilst most governments’ supportive measures have kept businesses afloat during the most depressing stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, these massive liquidity injections can also hide the risk of keeping financially fragile firms alive artificially, thus starting a process that turns them into zombie firms (zombies). In this article, we investigate whether and under what circumstances the presence of zombies in an industry constitutes a barrier to the innovativeness of non-zombies in the same sector. By analysing matched patent-firm data from Bureau van Dijk ORBIS Intellectual Property on 426, 130 Italian firms from 2012 to 2018, we find evidence in favour of negative intraindustry spillovers. Nonetheless, this general relationship is subject to various contingencies connected to both industry and firm characteristics. Specifically, we highlight that the retention of zombies can congest the innovative activities of healthy firms, especially when they depend on external sources of finance, operate in highly competitive markets, are more exposed to the erosion of their market shares, and do not possess a pre-existing strong knowledge base. Our findings have relevant policy and managerial implications. |
| Keywords: | zombie firms, innovation, Italy, spillovers, poisson, instrumental variable |
| JEL: | O31 L20 D22 |
| Date: | 2023–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ahy:wpaper:wp40 |
| By: | WOOLFORD Jayne (European Commission - JRC); LALANNE Marie (European Commission - JRC) |
| Abstract: | European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) programming in the 2021-2027 financial period rec-ognises the role of human capital in place-based approaches to territorial development and innova-tive transformation, allowing for investment in skills for smart specialisation, industrial transition and entrepreneurship. This research quantifies the amount of investment earmarked across the EU-27 for this, alongside similar investments under the temporary Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), acknowledging the importance, and yet complexity, of ensuring complementarity between the funding streams. Whilst the legal basis for both resides in the Union’s goal of strengthening eco-nomic, social and territorial cohesion and reducing disparities, the design and implementation of the two instruments reflects different governance models, performance frameworks, policy priorities and actors. The analysis aims to capture how these two instruments support skills development rel-evant to the twin transitions and smart specialisation domains across heterogeneous socio-economic and institutional territories within the context of the European Semester recommenda-tions. However, it provides an overview of proposed investment at the point of adoption of the two sets of programmes in 2022 and 2023, recognising that the results and impact of the allocations, and their integration and connection with their local innovation ecosystem, will depend upon the ter-ritorial context, the projects and beneficiaries selected and implementation approaches. |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:iptwpa:jrc139050 |
| By: | Andres, Pia |
| Abstract: | Low cost solar energy is key to enabling the transition away from fossil fuels. Despite this, the European Union followed the United States’ example in imposing anti-dumping tariffs on solar panel imports from China in 2013, arguing that Chinese panels were unfairly subsidised and harmed its domestic industry. This paper examines the effects of Chinese import competition on firm-level innovation in solar photovoltaic technology by European firms using a sample of 10, 137 firms in 15 EU countries over the period 1999–2020. I show that firms which were exposed to higher import competition innovated more if they had a relatively small existing stock of innovation, but less if their historical knowledge stock fell within the top 10th percentile of firms in the sample. This suggests that newer firms were more able to respond to increased competition by innovating, while firms with a large historical stock of innovation may have been locked into old technological paradigms. As firms with a smaller knowledge stock tended to innovate more overall, trade with China appears to have been beneficial in encouraging innovation among the most innovative firms. However, I also find evidence that import competition increased the probability of exit among firms in the sample. |
| JEL: | R14 J01 |
| Date: | 2024–10–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:125801 |