Innovation Capabilities and Learning: Virtuous and Vicious Circles

Joost Heijs

Chapter 9 in Interactive Learning for Innovation, 2012, pp 206-233 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract There is no doubt about the fact that innovation is a key to economic growth (Freeman, 1994; Fagerberg, 1994, 2009) and that the development of advanced technologies is an important factor in the competitive advantage of a country, a region, or enterprise (Freeman, 1987; Porter, 1990). So it can be stated that the competitive strength of a state or firm depends, partially, on its innovation capabilities. In this chapter we analyze the improvement of such innovation capabilities in firms that have carried out publicly supported R&D projects. Therefore we study, first of all, the intensity of such learning effects based on internal projects and on the technology transfer flows between partners of the cooperative R&D projects. A second aspect of our analysis is the elaboration of the profile of the firms with higher or lower learning effects. This chapter points out that the firms with a low innovative level have a distinctly lower learning capability than the more innovative firms. Moreover, in some circumstances the firms with a free-rider behavior seem to show, at the same time, a less intensive learning effect. So the main conclusions of this chapter are that the less innovative firms are trapped in a vicious circle and can reduce the technological gap with respect to other firms only by extraordinary efforts. For this reason the improvement of the learning capabilities of a firm should be an important goal of public intervention in the field of technological change and R&D; to initiate a ‘catching-up’ process in the less innovative firms, financial support instruments should be combined with technical support and intensive consultancy services.

Keywords: Technology Transfer; Learning Effect; Absorptive Capacity; Innovation Management; Cooperative Project (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:palchp:978-0-230-36242-0_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230362420

DOI: 10.1057/9780230362420_10

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().