The organisational and geographic diversity and innovation potential of EU-funded research networks

Daniel Nepelski, Vincent Van Roy and Annarosa Pesole

The Journal of Technology Transfer, 2019, vol. 44, issue 2, No 3, 359-380

Abstract: Abstract Public funding of research improves the systemic conditions of entrepreneurial ecosystems. It provides early-stage financing to technologies that form the basis for new products and services. In addition to financial support, instruments as the EC Framework Programmes (FP) facilitate the creation of research networks. By bringing together organisations of various types and geographic origins and increasing the diversity of their interactions, the instrument seeks to accelerate a discovery process in which organisations attempt to bring desired innovations to the market and society. In this paper, we examine the impact of organisational and geographic diversity of partnerships in EU-funded research networks on the commercial potential of their innovations. We explore a sample of 603 collaborative research projects supported by European FPs. We use data from the Innovation Radar, a unique survey database developed by DG CONNECT to assess the innovation outcomes of FP projects in ICT. We show that innovations developed by research networks with a higher organisational diversity have more commercial potential. This finding supports the idea that policies improving systemic conditions of entrepreneurship ecosystems through the creation of institutionally diverse research networks can have beneficial effects on the commercialisation potential of innovations developed in FP projects. In contrast, research networks with a wider range of internationally dispersed research partners are likely to have less innovation potential. This may suggest the existence of coordination and communication difficulties in FP projects where geographic diversity is greater.

Keywords: Research networks; Innovation policy; Framework programme; Diversity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L52 L53 O25 O31 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10961-018-9692-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jtecht:v:44:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s10961-018-9692-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/10961/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10961-018-9692-2

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Technology Transfer is currently edited by Albert N. Link, Donald S. Siegel, Barry Bozeman and Simon Mosey

More articles in The Journal of Technology Transfer from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().