Design and eco-innovation: micro-evidence from the Eurobarometer survey

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the role of design in making firms eco-innovate. Going beyond the 'packed' approach of environmental studies about 'eco-design', we maintain that the eco-innovative ..

Monitoring SMEs’ performance in Europe: Methodological assessment of the SME Scoreboard 2017

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (DG GROW), with the scientific support by the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), assesses the Performance of Small and Medium Enterprises in Europe, depending on the performance in the ten principles of: (1) Entrepreneurship, (2) ‘Second chance’, (3) ‘Think small first’, (4) ‘Responsive administration’, (5) State aid & public procurement, (6) Access to finance, (7) Single market, (8) Skills and innovation, (9) Environment, and (10) Internationalisation. This JRC technical report describes the underlying rationale behind the quantitative measurement of these principles and discusses the methodological approach which has been followed to calculate how countries perform in the outlined principles, from the choice of the indicators, to the data quality controls (including missing data and outliers), normalization and weightings, to the statistical coherence and robustness checks of the 2017 edition.JRC.I.1-Modelling, Indicators and Impact Evaluatio

The drivers and implications of environmental innovations: European evidence at different levels of analysis

The present work is a collection of three essays devoted at understanding the determinants and implications of the adoption of environmental innovations EI by firms, by adopting different but strictly related schumpeterian perspectives. Each of the essays is an empirical analysis that investigates one original research question, formulated to properly fill the gaps that emerged in previous literature, as the broad introduction of this thesis outlines. The first Chapter is devoted at understanding the determinants of EI by focusing on the role that knowledge sources external to the boundaries of the firm, such as those coming from business suppliers or customers or even research organizations, play in spurring their adoption. The second Chapter answers the question on what induces climate change technologies, adopting regional and sectoral lens, and explores the relation among green knowledge generation, inducement in climate change and environmental performances. Chapter 3 analyzes the economic implications of the adoption of EI for firms, and proposes to disentangle EI by different typologies of innovations, such as externality reducing innovations and energy and resource efficient innovations. Each Chapter exploits different dataset and heterogeneous econometric models, that allow a better extension of the results and to overcome the limits that the choice of one dataset with respect to its alternatives engenders. The first and third Chapter are based on an empirical investigation on microdata, i.e. firm level data extracted from innovation surveys. The second Chapter is based on the analysis of patent data in green technologies that have been extracted by the PATSTAT and REGPAT database. A general conclusive Chapter will follow the three essays and will outline how each Chapter filled the research gaps that emerged, how its results can be interpreted, which policy implications can be derived and which are the possible future lines of research in the field

Financial barriers and environmental innovations: evidence from EU manufacturing firms

Environmental innovations (EI) are essential to achieve economic growth and environmental protection goals. Technological development is one of the key factors that can counterbalance the growth and population emission-augmenting effects. EI are a priority in major EU policy strategies and a prerequisite for the development of a ‘Resource efficient Europe’, one of the flagship initiatives of Europe 2020. The existence of financial barriers can constitute a serious deterrent for the eco-innovative capacity of firms, even more than for ‘traditional’ innovations, as EI are characterized by high technical risk, long payback period and uncertainty on the appropriability of private rents. This article analyses in depth whether barriers related to external financing affect EI investments and whether the stringency of financial constraints to investments in EI is affected by factors related to EI specificities. We show that when both direct and indirect effects on EI investments are considered, the role of the policy framework appears to be as particularly crucial in order to reverse the risk/return trade-off of eco-innovative investments. Targeting policy interventions to facilitate access to credit and to mitigate capital markets’ imperfections is essential to mitigate the apparent contradiction between EU industrial policies and climate abatement scenarios

Sailing through the storms towards Treasure Island: The relationships between strategies, obstacles and firm performance

Companies devise strategies to successfully navigate the treacherous waters of an uncertain business environment. They need to tackle regulatory or market obstacles in order to succeed and eventually achieve strong growth performance. This study aims to better understand the complex relationship between strategies, obstacles and firm performance. It uses regression techniques on a cross-national homogeneous sample of 37,150 European companies based in 14 Member States in order to study the correlation between: i) firms’ perceptions about the importance of their strategies and the obstacles they face, and ii) firms’ innovation and economic performance. The findings point out that the firms pursuing cost reduction strategies and perceiving the lack of demand and of adequate finance as important obstacles experience poor performance. By contrast, those pursuing adaptability strategies and perceiving the lack of qualified personnel as an important obstacle grow faster, and those with explicit product innovation strategies innovate more. Moreover, the results indicate specific needs of high-growth enterprises that, in comparison with other firms, appear less sensitive about financial constraints, more interested in the availability of skilled labour and benefiting more from cooperative strategies.JRC.I.1-Modelling, Indicators and Impact Evaluatio

Open for growth? Evidence on EU countries and sectors

The Open Innovation (OI) concept has pervaded the academic and policy debate due to its potential to further stimulate the circulation of knowledge between business partners and institutions and, consequently, to increase their innovation potential. This paper studies the relationships between OI and innovation and economic returns at the \u2018aggregate\u2019 level, i.e. at the country and industry levels. It exploits three waves of the Community Innovation Survey to conduct an empirical analysis on sectoral data for 16 EU countries. Results confirm the role of OI in stimulating \u2013 even at the aggregate level \u2013 innovation, with returns increasing at diminishing rates. OI also has an indirect impact on value added by strengthening the positive effect exerted on aggregate economic performance by R&D expenditure. The mutual reinforcement of R&D intensity and collaborations between companies and business partners is coherent with the principles underlying \u2018smart specialization\u2019 policies of the European Union

Open for Growth? Evidence on EU countries

The Open Innovation concept has pervaded the academic and policy debate, due to its potential to further stimulate the circulation of knowledge across business partners and institutions and, consequently, to increase their innovation potential. The contribution of this paper is to unveil the economic returns associated to such a model, to answer the main question whether the productivity growth slowdown observed in the EU in recent years could be overcome through a more open and dynamic innovation environment. An empirical analysis conducted on sectoral data for 16 EU countries is provided, exploiting three waves of the Community Innovation Survey. Results confirm the role of Open Innovation in stimulating – even at the aggregate level – innovation, and, to a limited extent, to economic returns. However, when testing for the association between Open Innovation and economic growth, no robust effect emerges.JRC.I.1-Monitoring, Indicators & Impact Evaluatio

The \u201cgreen-impact\u201d of the open innovation mode. Bridging knowledge sourcing and absorptive capacity for environmental innovations

This policy brief presents recent results on the impact that an open innovation mode has on European firms' environmental innovations. New evidence drawn from the CIS suggests that knowledge sourcing can increase the environmental innovation performance of firms. However, the way firms search for external knowledge and work to absorb it can lead them to different results, depending on whether they are involved in the adoption of an ecoinnovation or the extension of their ecoinnovation portfolio. Drawing on these results, policy implications for the European Research and Innovation Agenda are discussed

The Determinants of Population Growth

This report studies population dynamics in Europe. Its purpose is threefold. First, the report offers a literature review of the main drivers of population growth. Second, an empirical analysis is carried out in order to unveil the determinants of population growth in EU sub-regions (NUTS3 level) over the period 2000-2010. Spatial econometrics is employed to account for spatial dependence among neighbouring regions. Third, the existing evidence on the long-run relationship between economic and population growth is discussed, followed by an empirical assessment of the relationship between these two aggregates in Europe over the period 1960-2010. Time-series econometric tools are used for this analysis. The main findings of both the litterature reviews and empirical analyses are discussed, along with their implications and future extensions.JRC.I.1-Modelling, Indicators and Impact Evaluatio

Towards an Innovation-Intensive Circular Economy. Integrating Research, Industry and Policies

The report ‘Towards an Innovation-intensive Circular Economy. Integrating research, industry, and policies’ is a result of the cooperation between FEEM and Università Cattolica. The report proposes an original perspective to the circular economy as a paradigm of change that involves the whole production system. While material circularity is increasing under the pressure of decades of waste/recycling policies in Europe and Italy, a ‘new’ circular economy more intensive of technological and social innovation is establishing itself beyond the waste/recycling system, and it involves the material and organisational efficiency of enterprises and the whole production/consumption systems. The report starts from a stocktaking of definitions, public policies, quantifications, innovations, and institutional initiatives on the circular economy in Europe and in Italy. Two ‘integrative approaches’ are then proposed for achieving a better interaction between research, industry, and policies. The first approach exploits the concepts of ‘System of innovation’ (national, regional, sectoral) to redefine the process towards a circular economy. In such a ‘System of innovation’, enterprises are at the core, and the sub-systems of policies, finance, research/university, and civil society can contribute, through network interactions, to the change of the industrial and consumption paradigms towards resource efficiency and circularity. By means of this approach, it is easier to understand the importance of internal factors (for example industrial capabilities and strategies) as well external factors (for example European research programmes and finance) in creating opportunities or barriers to the circular economy. The second ‘integrative’ approach mirrors the intrinsically systemic features of the circular economy by suggesting to put it in connection to other major transitions of this phase, in particular decarbonisation and the bioeconomy, through a NEXUS-type approach. The interactions between circular economy, decarbonisation, and the bioeconomy are several but not necessarily they are synergic in that potential conflicts may arise. Synergies and conflicts, for example through an intensive use of biomass for energy, are not fully recognised by policies, which are still designed and implemented with a sector-minded approach. This can impair the performance of enterprises in pursuing a profitable circularity strategy. The report also addresses some open issues in the ‘economics of the circular economy’, like the low prices of primary commodities that do not create incentives to circularity innovations, thus assigning a major burden to policy instruments (for example fiscal instruments), and the changing attitude of the financial sector, which is moving towards the adoption of circularity criteria in the allocation for financial resources