Patent data as a tool to monitor S & T portfolio's.

This article deals with the use of patent data to monitor science and technology (S&T) portfolios. S&T portfolios have become central tools to examine and to monitor the vitality of both institutions and regions in the innovation game that underpins their economic growth and development. Those portfolios have to be monitored not only at the intra-organizational level, but also at the inter-organizational level and at the levels of specific systems of innovation. Therefore, the development of appropriate, easy-to-use and transparent, benchmark indicators to assess the strengths and weaknesses of organizational S&T portfolios is tantamount. In this paper, we report the construction of such a benchmark indicator and we assess its usefulness by applying it to the European Patent Database.Data; Science; Regions; Systems;

The impact of M&A on the R&D process. An empirical analysis of the role of technological and market relatedness.

While the impact of M&A on R&D and innovation examined at the aggregate level left inconclusive evidence, we find that at the level of the R&D process both the technological and market relatedness between the target and acquirer are helpful dimensions to identify effects. Using information on 31 in-depth cases of individual M&A deals we show that technological relatedness between M&A partners directly affects the inputs and organizational structure of the R&D process. M&A partners that operate in the same technological fields tend to reduce their R&D effort and rationalize the R&D process after the M&A compared to firms active in complementary technological fields that merge. These firms will furthermore face less technological competition in the technology market, but risk creating a more bureaucratic R&D process with a less motivated workforce. Market relatedness between partners, while having comparable aggregate effects on the R&D process, operates on different dimensions of the R&D process. Former rivals that engage in a M&A are significantly less likely to expand into new R&D fields or leverage their technological competences across the products and markets of the new entity. Non-rival firms that join forces, on the contrary, significantly increase R&D output and productivity through these activities.Competition; Effects; Field; Firms; Information; Innovation; International; M&A; Market; Market relatedness; Markets; Organizational structure; Processes; Product; R&D; Risk; Scale and scope; Structure; Subsidiaries; Technolocal relatedness; Technology diffusion;

Predicting velocity growth: a time series perspective

Velocity of money ; Forecasting

Research, development and innovation in Flanders 2004.

Research and Development; Innovation; Flanders;

Can Europe recover without credit?

Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggests that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in middle-income countries and 3.2 percent per year in high-income countries. However, the implications of these historical episodes for the current European situation are limited, for two main reasons. First, creditless recoveries are much less common in highincome countries, than in low-income countries which are financially undeveloped. European economies heavily depend on bank loans and research suggests that loan supply played a major role in the recent weak credit performance of Europe. There are reasons to believe that, despite various efforts, normal lending has not yet been restored. Limited loan supply could be disruptive for the European economic recovery and there has been only a minor substitution of bank loans with debt securities. Second, creditless recoveries were associated with significant real exchange rate depreciation, which has hardly occurred so far in most of Europe. This stylised fact suggests that it might be difficult to re-establish economic growth in the absence of sizeable real exchange rate depreciation, if credit growth does not return

Just how difficult can it be counting up R&D funding for emerging technologies (and is tech mining with proxy measures going to be any better?)

Decision makers considering policy or strategy related to the development of emerging technologies expect high quality data on the support for different technological options. A natural starting point would be R&D funding statistics. This paper explores the limitations of such aggregated data in relation to the substance and quantification of funding for emerging technologies. Using biotechnology as an illustrative case, we test the utility of a novel taxonomy to demonstrate the endemic weaknesses in the availability and quality of data from public and private sources. Using the same taxonomy, we consider the extent to which tech-mining presents an alternative, or potentially complementary, way to determine support for emerging technologies using proxy measures such as patents and scientific publications

Collusion through Joint R&D: An Empirical Assessment

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We consider an oligopolistic setting where firms enter in research joint ventures (RJVs) to lower production costs or coordinate on collusion in the product market. We show that a sufficient condition for identifying collusive behavior is a decline in the market share of RJV-participating firms, which is also necessary and sufficient for a decrease in consumer welfare. Using information from the US National Cooperation Research Act, we estimate a market share equation correcting for the endogeneity of RJV participation and R&D expenditures. We find robust evidence that large networks between direct competitors – created through firms being members in several RJVs at the same time – are conducive to collusive outcomes in the product market which reduce consumer welfare. By contrast, RJVs among non-competitors are efficiency enhancing

Knowledge Sharing in Alliances and Alliance Portfolios

We develop a model of knowledge sharing in alliances and alliance portfolios. We show that, once the issue of encouraging effective collaboration is put center stage, many standard intuitions of the learning race view and alliance portfolio literature are overturned or qualified. Partners engage in learning races in some cases, but exhibit “altruistic” behaviors in other cases. They may reduce their own absorptive capacity or increase the transparency of their own operations to facilitate their partner’s learning. In alliance portfolios, we show that not all substitutability between alliance portfolio partners is bad. We distinguish between substitutability in implementation and substitutability in rival benefits and show that the latter is conducive to knowledge sharing. Our work contributes toward putting the literature on learning alliances on a more solid foundation by emphasizing the importance of commitments that leading firms can make to encourage collaboration

Leading school networks, hybrid leadership in action?

A range of different constructs are used to describe and define the way that leadership operates in education settings. This range can be presented as binary categories of leadership, in which either one, or the other form of leadership is preferred, but not both. An example of this is the contrast made between solo and distributed leadership. A more sophisticated alternative has been proposed, which is to consider leadership as a hybrid activity, one which entails a range of approaches inspired by varying ideals. Taking this ‘hybrid’ notion of leadership this article explores the nature of leadership in networks of schools. Illustrated with data from three case studies of school networks this article highlights some of the issues and tensions in the enactment of the hybrid forms of leadership encountered in these networks. This article concludes with some reflections on the adoption of hybrid notions of leadership in researching and enacting educational leadership and specifically on the place of school networks in that consideration

The multinational enterprise as a source of international knowledge flows:direct evidence from Italy

This paper examines the determinants of technology transfer between parent firms and their international affiliates, and of knowledge spillovers from those affiliates to host-country firms. Using a unique data set of foreign multinational enterprise (MNE) affiliates based in Italy, we find that affiliate investment in R&D and investment in capital-embodied technology plays a significant role in determining the nature of intra-firm technology flows. However, the basis for any spillovers arising from MNE affiliates does not originate from codified knowledge associated with R&D, but rather from the productivity of the affiliate