National culture as a determinant of firms’ innovative performance

General innovation performance of the EU is improving, yet progress is too slow and performance gaps still remain wide within European Union. Therefore, there is a growing interest in circumstances which influence this situation. In their previous research, the authors of this paper have already proved that cultural diversity affect the innovative capacity of societies, hence the goal of thisstudy was to explore how important, in the context of other determinants of firms‘ innovative performance, are socio-cultural determinants. The results revealed that they are less relevant than technological and economic determinants but affirmed to be more significant than political, legal and ecological ones. In order to reach the conclusions, a review of scientific literature, comparative judgement of EU performance and correlation analysis were used

EU framework programmes: positive and negative effects on member states' innovation performance

Research background: Seeking to ensure competitiveness in the global market, the EU is constantly improving its innovation policy. Compared to other EU initiatives, the Framework Programs for Research and Innovation (FPs) act as the main instrument with the longest history and the largest budget to boost member states' innovation performance. Despite the initial presumptions that these financial inflows should bring positive and constructive effects, the results significantly diverge across the countries with highly uneven and incoherent progress. Therefore, complex and reliable tools must be adopted to evaluate the long-term influence of EU investment and the reasons which distort the innovation performance in separate member states. Purpose of the article: The purpose of this article is to evaluate the influence of EU investment on its member states? innovation performance by using a redeveloped national innovative capacity framework and including technological, non-technological and commercial innovative output. Methods: Panel unit root tests were used to assess the time series stationarity. Autoregressive distributed lag models helped in calculating the long-term influence of EU investment on member states? innovation performance. Finally, by employing dummies, it was analysed how this influence varied over time and across different countries. Findings & value added: The findings provide evidence that EU investment exerts positive long-term influence on the technological innovative output proxied as total, business and higher education institutions? patent applications, as well as product and process innovations. The effects were also positive on trademarks and marketing, and organisational innovations. However, small but negative influence was found in the case of patent applications by the government sector and the exports of hi-tech products and knowledge-intensive services. These insights may serve in the designing process of the specific instruments and the future innovation policies, which would bring the maximum benefit for the society and economy

Redeveloping the National Innovative Capacity Framework: European Union Perspective

This paper aims to redevelop the national innovative capacity framework and specify the influence of its’ elements on shaping the innovation performance of the EU nations. The objects of the empirical research are the EU member states for the period of 2000–2018. The collected data is employed in a multivariate Granger causality analysis that illustrates the causal links between the analyzed indicators and considers their dynamics. The results demonstrate that countries seeking to increase the levels of innovative outputs should mostly focus on scientific excellence and international economic activities. A redevelopment of the framework also helped discover that gender equality and corruption have causal links with all forms of the investigated innovation indicators—technological, non-technological, and commercial ones. The outcomes of this study highlight the most critical areas where EU member states could focus to improve their national innovation performance and may assist policymakers in the designing process of future innovation policies

European Union Innovation Efficiency Assessment Based on Data Envelopment Analysis

Though much attention is dedicated to the development of its research and innovation policy, the European Union constantly struggles to match the level of the strongest innovators in the world. Therefore, there is a necessity to analyze the individual efforts and conditions of the 27 member states that might determine their final innovative performance. The results of a scientific literature review showed that there is a growing interest in the usage of artificial intelligence when seeking to improve decision-making processes. Data envelopment analysis, as a branch of computational intelligence methods, has proved to be a reliable tool for innovation efficiency evaluation. Therefore, this paper aimed to apply DEA for the assessment of the European Union’s innovation efficiency from 2000 to 2020, when innovation was measured by patent, trademark, and design applications. The findings showed that the general EU innovation efficiency situation has improved over time, meaning that each programming period was more successful than the previous one. On the other hand, visible disparities were found across the member states, showing that Luxembourg is an absolute innovation efficiency leader, while Greece and Portugal achieved the lowest average efficiency scores. Both the application of the DEA method and the gathered results may act as viable guidelines on how to improve R&I policies and select future investment directions