Technological capabilities in Central and Eastern Europe: An analysis based on priority patents

This contribution studies the technological capabilities of Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies based on priority filings for the period of 19802009. From a global perspective, the indicators suggest a division of labour in technological activities among world regions whereby Europe, Latin America and the former USSR are specializing in sectors losing technological dynamism (Chemicals and Mechanical Engineering) while North America, the Middle East (especially Israel) and Asia Pacific are increasingly specializing in Electrical Engineering, a sector with significant technological opportunities. Regarding priority filings, CEE reduced its technological activities drastically after 1990. The recovery of CEE economies regarding technological capabilities is unfolding very slowly. The results speak for the ability of CEE countries in contributing to a limited number of fields with growing technological opportunities. The technological profile of the CEE region will more likely than not complicate the technology upgrading process towards activities at the technological frontier

Effects of innovation and domestic market factors on OECD countries’ exports of wind power technologies

This chapter explores the effects of policies and other factors driving innovation in wind-power technologies in twelve OECD countries over more than two decades. Patent counts are used as an indicator for innovation. The factors considered are generally derived from the systems of innovation literature. Count data econometric model were used for the estimations. The suggest that patenting in wind-power technology is positively related to public R&D in wind power (reflecting supply-side policy), the stock of wind capacity (reflecting learning effects), the number of patents per capita (reflecting a country’s innovative capacity), and the share of Green party voters (reflecting the legitimacy of the technology). In particular, the presence of production or capacity targets for wind power or renewable energy sources and a stable policy environment (reflecting policy process) appear to be favourable for patenting wind-power technologies. These results are robust to various model specifications, distributional assumptions, and alternative classifications of windpower technologies in the patent search

A plea for varieties of entrepreneurship

Research into the link between national institutions and entrepreneurship is characterized by three shortcomings: First, clear-cut concepts of institutions are rare. Second, a parsimonious understanding of how a few core institutions influence entrepreneurship is missing. Third, scholars often ignore that incrementally innovative ventures constitute a distinct (and under-researched) type of entrepreneurship next to the (over-researched) form of radically innovative, high-growth or high-tech entrepreneurship. By addressing these three shortcomings, the Varieties-of-Capitalism (VoC) literature can explain how a core group of distinct national institutions facilitate the development of different types of entrepreneurship between countries. In particular, the VoC framework illustrates the comparative institutional advantage that continental European economies offer to incrementally innovative ventures. Applications of the VoC reasoning to entrepreneurship studies would thus allow researchers to, first, perform focused rather than eclectic analyses of institutional influences on entrepreneurship. Second, it would pave the way for research into institutionally induced equifinality. Third, entrepreneurship research could move away from its wishful ideology displaying radically innovative entrepreneurship as the most desirable form of entrepreneurship. As a consequence, policymakers could target entrepreneurial support measures more specifically to their economy’s institutional environment