Succeeding in innovation: key insights on the role of R&D and technological acquisition drawn from company data

Andrea Conte and Marco Vivarelli ()

Empirical Economics, 2014, vol. 47, issue 4, 1317-1340

Abstract: This paper discusses the relationship between a company’s investment in innovation and its success in introducing new product and/or process innovations. In doing so, this analysis departs from the standard approach which puts forward a homogenous R&D-based knowledge production function by introducing different types of innovation investments (R&D and technology acquisition) for different sets of companies. Using the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) dataset comprising more than 3,000 Italian manufacturing companies, the econometric analysis adopts a set of techniques which allows to control for the sample selection, endogeneity and simultaneity problems which arise when dealing with CIS data. The main findings are summarised as follows: (1) beyond the acknowledged effect of R&D in increasing the probability of success of product innovation, a larger-than-expected role is played by technology acquisition in the innovation process; (2) the relative importance of R&D and technology acquisition varies significantly across different types of companies where crucial dimensions of analysis are company size and the technological domain of a sector. Copyright European Union 2014

Keywords: R&D; Product innovation; Process innovation; Embodied technical change; Sample selection; SUR; Community innovation survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (57)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00181-013-0779-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Succeeding in Innovation: Key Insights on the Role of R&D and Technological Acquisition Drawn from Company Data (2013)
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:spr:empeco:v:47:y:2014:i:4:p:1317-1340

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-013-0779-1

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().