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

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

The Italian Industry/Enterprise 4.0 Plan: Ex-ante identification of potential beneficiaries and ex-post assessment of the use of incentives

Das italienische Statistikinstitut (ISTAT) ist neben seiner Rolle als Mitglied des statistischen Systems der EU - d. H. Offizieller Anbieter wirtschafts- und sozialstatistischer Daten und Indikatoren - auch die größte öffentliche Forschungseinrichtung Italiens, die mit der Durchführung wirtschaftspolitischer Bewertungen beauftragt ist. Die Einführung eines innovativen Programms für Industriepolitik durch das italienische Wirtschaftsministerium (MISE) im Jahr 2016, dessen Schwerpunkt auf der Unterstützung der Digitalisierung italienischer Unternehmen liegt, hat ISTAT die einmalige Gelegenheit gegeben, originelle analytische und politische Bewertungsmethoden zu testen . Nach dem deutschen Vorbild einer Industrie 4.0-Plattform (Rüßmann et al. 2015; ZEW 2015) hat MISE eine Strategie zur Unterstützung der digitalen Transformation des italienischen Unternehmenssektors entwickelt (Nationaler Plan „Industrie 4.0“, letztendlich „Unternehmen 4.0“), also eher als Prozess-Enabler als als Hauptdarsteller. Die Schlüsselmaßnahme für eine solche Politik ist in der Tat eine Erhöhung der Abschreibungspauschale für Maschineninvestitionen. Nach diesem Anreizsystem beträgt die Abschreibungspauschale, dh der Betrag, um den ein Unternehmen seinen Gewinn bei der Berechnung der Steuern verringern kann, einen Prozentsatz der 140% (anstatt 100%) der Anschaffungskosten für Industrieanlagen, der sich erhöht bis zu 250%, wenn in digital angeschlossene Geräte investiert wird