Business innovation statistics and the evolution of the Oslo Manual

After the publication of the fourth (2018) edition of the Oslo Manual, a key methodological reference for producing innovation statistics at international level, a review of the definitions of innovation – or, better, business innovation – used by the community of official statisticians has to be recommended. The main reason for such a review is the need to assess to what extent the current Oslo Manual has benefited from the rich economic and management literature on firms’ innovation produced since the publication of the previous edition in 2005. It should also be pointed out that the current Manual was expected to fix some long-standing issues like that of properly accommodating service innovation in a statistical framework constantly biased towards innovation in tangible goods and technology-related phenomena. This article argues that these challenges have been only partially met. By reviving some concepts used in the past, such as the object-oriented approach to measure innovation, and being especially concerned to make the statistical framework designed to measure business innovation applicable in other sectors of the economy (including individuals and households), some specific features of the business innovation processes may have been neglected. The Manual discusses a wide array of issues regarding the economics of innovation and management practices, however it does not define a new consistent framework able to accommodate the demand for indicators about the influence on business innovation of the ongoing processes of digitalization, servitization or open innovation and, at least partially, to adopt a service-dominant logic

Innovation and Development. The Evidence from Innovation Surveys.

In this article we investigate the existing evidence on innovation produced by innovation surveys in developing and emerging countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. We review the relevant literature, discuss methodological issues, and analyse the results for the countries with the most comparable surveys, considering the well established findings of innovation surveys for Europe as a benchmark. From the evidence we considered, regional patterns are identified and some stylized facts on innovation and development are proposed, pointing out the specificity of innovation processes in economies engaged in industrialisation and catching-up.Innovation Surveys, Patterns of Innovation, Emerging Countries.

How do companies ‘perceive’ their intangibles? New statistical evidence from the INNOBAROMETER 2013

The report provides a statistical analysis of the way European companies have shown to perceive their Intangibles in the recent Innobarometer-2013. The report is intended to complement the evidence presented in the FLASH EUROBAROMETER 369 (“Investing in Intangibles”) with a deeper investigation of both the characteristics of the available micro-data and the regularities emerging from their statistical analysis. A special focus is placed on the extent to which companies perceive their intangibles as strategic and on that to which the relative investments interplay with their innovative projects. The role of context conditions vs. that of business incentives in motivating their intangible investments is also addressed.JRC.J.2-Knowledge for Growt

Reverse causality in the R&D – patents relationship: an interpretation of the innovation persistence

Starting from the failure of the R&D-patents traditional relationship, when time-series and/or within industry dimensions are included in the empirical analysis, the present work tries to contribute to the empirical literature in two directions. Firstly, it perform a Granger causality test on the theoretical presumption of a reverse patents→R&D link as an explanation of the failure of the traditional relationship. Second, assuming the reverse patents-R&D causality, we test and interpret the lag structure of such a relationship as showing the effective patent life which firms expect in the two Schumpeterian patterns of innovations they belong to. To the light of the effective patent life, we offer a further explanation of innovation persistence which overturns the findings of the existing literature on persistence

Reverse causality in the R&D – patents relationship: an interpretation of the innovation persistence

Starting from the failure of the R&D-patents traditional relationship, when time-series and/or within industry dimensions are included in the empirical analysis, the present work tries to contribute to the empirical literature in two directions. Firstly, it perform a Granger causality test on the theoretical presumption of a reverse patents→R&D link as an explanation of the failure of the traditional relationship. Second, assuming the reverse patents-R&D causality, we test and interpret the lag structure of such a relationship as showing the effective patent life which firms expect in the two Schumpeterian patterns of innovations they belong to. To the light of the effective patent life, we offer a further explanation of innovation persistence which overturns the findings of the existing literature on persistence

Exploring the Potentialities of Automatic Extraction of University Webometric Information

The main objective of this work is to show the potentialities of recently developed approaches for automatic knowledge extraction directly from the universities’ websites. The information automatically extracted can be potentially updated with a frequency higher than once per year, and be safe from manipulations or misinterpretations. Moreover, this approach allows us flexibility in collecting indicators about the efficiency of universities’ websites and their effectiveness in disseminating key contents. These new indicators can complement traditional indicators of scientific research (e.g. number of articles and number of citations) and teaching (e.g. number of students and graduates) by introducing further dimensions to allow new insights for “profiling” the analyzed universities. The main findings of this study concern the evaluation of the potential in digitalization of universities, in particular by presenting techniques for the automatic extraction of information from the web to build indicators of quality and impact of universities’ websites. These indicators can complement traditional indicators and can be used to identify groups of universities with common features using clustering techniques working with the above indicators

Demographic, clinical, biomarker, and neuropathological correlates of posterior cortical atrophy: an international cohort study and individual participant data meta-analysis

Background: Posterior cortical atrophy is a rare syndrome characterised by early, prominent, and progressive impairment in visuoperceptual and visuospatial processing. The disorder has been associated with underlying neuropathological features of Alzheimer's disease, but large-scale biomarker and neuropathological studies are scarce. We aimed to describe demographic, clinical, biomarker, and neuropathological correlates of posterior cortical atrophy in a large international cohort.// Methods: We searched PubMed between database inception and Aug 1, 2021, for all published research studies on posterior cortical atrophy and related terms. We identified research centres from these studies and requested deidentified, individual participant data (published and unpublished) that had been obtained at the first diagnostic visit from the corresponding authors of the studies or heads of the research centres. Inclusion criteria were a clinical diagnosis of posterior cortical atrophy as defined by the local centre and availability of Alzheimer's disease biomarkers (PET or CSF), or a diagnosis made at autopsy. Not all individuals with posterior cortical atrophy fulfilled consensus criteria, being diagnosed using centre-specific procedures or before development of consensus criteria. We obtained demographic, clinical, biofluid, neuroimaging, and neuropathological data. Mean values for continuous variables were combined using the inverse variance meta-analysis method; only research centres with more than one participant for a variable were included. Pooled proportions were calculated for binary variables using a restricted maximum likelihood model. Heterogeneity was quantified using I2.// Findings: We identified 55 research centres from 1353 papers, with 29 centres responding to our request. An additional seven centres were recruited by advertising via the Alzheimer's Association. We obtained data for 1092 individuals who were evaluated at 36 research centres in 16 countries, the other sites having not responded to our initial invitation to participate to the study. Mean age at symptom onset was 59·4 years (95% CI 58·9–59·8; I2=77%), 60% (56–64; I2=35%) were women, and 80% (72–89; I2=98%) presented with posterior cortical atrophy pure syndrome. Amyloid β in CSF (536 participants from 28 centres) was positive in 81% (95% CI 75–87; I2=78%), whereas phosphorylated tau in CSF (503 participants from 29 centres) was positive in 65% (56–75; I2=87%). Amyloid-PET (299 participants from 24 centres) was positive in 94% (95% CI 90–97; I2=15%), whereas tau-PET (170 participants from 13 centres) was positive in 97% (93–100; I2=12%). At autopsy (145 participants from 13 centres), the most frequent neuropathological diagnosis was Alzheimer's disease (94%, 95% CI 90–97; I2=0%), with common co-pathologies of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (71%, 54–88; I2=89%), Lewy body disease (44%, 25–62; I2=77%), and cerebrovascular injury (42%, 24–60; I2=88%).// Interpretation: These data indicate that posterior cortical atrophy typically presents as a pure, young-onset dementia syndrome that is highly specific for underlying Alzheimer's disease pathology. Further work is needed to understand what drives cognitive vulnerability and progression rates by investigating the contribution of sex, genetics, premorbid cognitive strengths and weaknesses, and brain network integrity

Investing in R&D in Italy. Trends and firms strategies 2001-2010.

The article makes use for the first time of a time series of firms investing in R&D in Italy associated with their persistence, i.e. whether they invested the years before. The paper shows a remarkable low degree of persistence and investigates the causes and consequences

The Statistical Measurement of Intangible Assets. Methodological Implications of the Results of the ISFOL 2011 Pilot Survey

This paper addresses some measurement issues concerning intangible assets (IA) by stemming from a recent pilot survey carried out on a sample of Italian firms. The survey has been sponsored by Isfol, the Italian Institute for the Development of Vocational Training for Workers (a public research body), with the technical co-operation of Istat, the Italian National Institute of Statistics. The aim of the paper is twofold: presenting the results of the pilot survey (although not being the realised sample representative of the population of Italian enterprises) and discussing some guidelines for future \u201cintangible assets\u201d surveys to be undertaken in the EU or OECD context. With a broader perspective, the proposal for a standard survey on the \u201cIntangible Assets\u201d in enterprises will be discussed by considering potential synergies, as well as infrastructural barriers, associated with the inclusion of an IA survey in the framework of official business statistics

Multinationals and R&D cooperation: empirical evidence from the Italian R&D survey

Using data on R&D performers active in Italy, we explore the effects of multinationality on the propensity to R&D cooperation. A fundamental departure from previous empirical literature is that we do not consider only subsidiaries of foreign MNEs but also domestic owned MNEs active in the observed country. First, the whole subset of firms active in Italy represented by multinationals – both foreign and domestic MNEs – exhibits the highest propensity to R&D cooperation. Second, foreign MNEs are better at R&D cooperating with foreign partners, but it is domestic owned MNEs that exhibit the highest propensity to R&D collaboration with local firms. By contrast, foreign MNEs have much the same propensity to enter local R&D cooperation as non-MNEs. This might reveal that the multinationality advantages of foreign MNEs – their superior technology and economies of common governance – are more than compensated by their “liabilities of foreignness” due to the extra-costs and risks of dealing with a relatively unfamiliar context. Third, when considering international R&D cooperation, foreign MNEs exhibit the highest premium, while domestic owned MNEs appear to have a lower propensity to collaborate abroad. Altogether, our results for Italy show that it is not foreignness but the specific combination of advantages and disadvantages of multinationality that explain R&D cooperation with both local and international partners