Knowledge investments, business R&D and innovativeness of countries. A qualitative meta-analytic comparison

P. van Hemert and Peter Nijkamp
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P. van Hemert: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Faculteit der Economische Wetenschappen en Econometrie (Free University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics Sciences, Business Administration and Economitrics

No 41, Serie Research Memoranda from VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics

Abstract: The relationship between knowledge investments, innovation and competitiveness is an important topic in both academic research and economic policy and has been studied extensively over the past decades. Nowadays, investments in private and public R&D are believed to make up the heart of a modern knowledge economy. The present paper adopts an evolutionary economics perspective and investigates whether, in addition to private R&D activities, also institutional support systems and policy interventions play a role in inducing innovation initiatives and creating impacts on the performance and competitiveness of industries. We aim to find support for the hypothesis that the competitiveness of industries in the international arena is sustained by the dynamic interaction between national, regional and sectoral innovation systems. This may provide stakeholders with a better understanding of the context in which they operate. Since according to the evolutionary metaphor, the growth of an innovation system follows complex dynamics that cannot simply be analysed within a static quantitative equilibrium framework, here we use an alternative approach based on qualitative pattern recognition analysis originating from artificial intelligence analysis. Besides R&D expenditures, human capital expenditures are regarded as the major input in the knowledge creation process in our analytical framework. To this end, in our paper a qualitative causal model that maps out conditional relations between key factors in national innovation systems will be described. The focus of our investigation is on systematic patterns in the competitiveness of the EU Member States, using statistical information on innovation input and output data from the European Innovation Scoreboard. In our analysis we find support for the hypothesis that there are indeed significant interactions

Keywords: competitiveness innovation; social cohesion; evolutionary economic geography; R&D; human capital; rough set analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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