This study does not find any significant direct relationship between the public R&D funding and the firms' innovation output. The firms obtaining the public R&D support were not performing significantly better, on average, than others. However, we find evidence that the public R&D finance has substantially influenced the innovation output of the firms that have undertaken certain types of innovations activities. Particularly, public funding targeted to the firms focusing on new business areas in their R&D projects seems successful. Certain types of collaboration seem to also generate better entrepreneurial performance in terms of innovation. Those large firms that have more intensively collaborated with the SMS firm partners in their publicly funded R&D projects have filed more patent applications than other companies.
This study empirically explores whether the public financial support for entrepreneurial R&D affects employment growth at the firm level. The data from the Finnish companies suggests that the firms that have received public R&D funding have not generally witnessed any greater employment growth than other companies. However, we find that the public R&D support targeted to the certain types of R&D activities notably contribute to the creation of new jobs: employment in those firms that have received public funding for the R&D projects targeted to the new business areas has clearly grown relatively more than in other companies. The relationship between the firm's total innovation and employment growth is not statistically significant.
This paper empirically explores how technology policy affects innovation behaviour in the telecommunications sector. Our empirical analysis aims at shedding light on the following highly topical issues: (I) Whether opening up the domestic market to competition spurs innovative activity?, (ii) Whether the presence of independent regulatory agency influence innovation behaviour of telecommunications operators?, and (iii) What is the direction of Granger-causality between innovation creation and technology diffusion in the communications sector? We develop an econometric model that takes into account the dynamic, non-linear nature of the innovation process and interdependency between equations for a patent count variable, R&D and technology diffusion. We use data from 61 major telecommunications operators between the years 1991 and 1996 to investigate how technology policy has influenced their innovative activities, i.e. their R&D expenditures and the number of patent applications, and the diffusion of communications technologies in their domestic markets. – Innovation ; technology diffusion ; telecommunications ; technology policy ; Tutkimus selvittää aineistoanalyysin avulla teknologiapolitiikan vaikutuksia innovaatiokäyttäytymiseen telekommunikaatiosektorilla. Empiirisen analyysin tavoitteena on valaista seuraavia ajankohtaisia kysymyksiä: (I) Kannustaako kotimaisten markkinoiden avaaminen kilpailulle innovaatiotoimintaa?, (ii) Onko riippumattoman sääntelyviranomaisen läsnäololla vaikutusta teleoperaattoreiden innovaatiokäyttäytymiseen?, (iii) Mikä on Granger-kausaalisuuden suunta innovaatioiden kehittämisen ja teknologioiden leviämisen välillä viestintäsektorilla? Tutkimuksessa kehitetään ekonometrinen malli, joka ottaa huomioon innovaatioprosessin dynaamisen, epälineaarisen luonteen sekä keskinäisen riippuvuuden yritysten patentointia, T&K-menoja ja teknologioiden leviämistä kuvaavien yhtälöiden välillä. Raportoidussa empiirisessä tutkimuksessa analysoidaan teknologiapolitiikan vaikutuksia teleyritysten innovaatiotoimintaan - niiden T&K-menoihin ja patenttihakemusten lukumäärään, sekä viestintäteknologioiden leviämiseen yritysten kotimaan markkinoilla - käyttäen aineistoa 61 suuren teleoperaattorin toiminnasta ajanjaksona 1991-1996. – Innovaatio ; teknologioiden leviäminen ; televiestintä ; teknologiapolitiikka
Our data concerning the whole Finnish company population from the years 2003-2008 suggest that the impacts of business subsidies on employment growth differ more between high-growth start-ups and other firms than between start-ups and over five years old incumbents. All subsidies seem to relate positively to the contemporary employment growth both among start-ups and incumbents. Furthermore, our data show that both the employment of start-ups and older incumbents receiving employment or other subsidies grow more than that of non-subsidized firms after subsidy reception. Instead, we find that business subsidies do not provide significant further boost for the contemporary or after-subsidy growth of gazelles. There are apparently some other factors dominating the growth of young high-growth firms making them to grow strongly, in many cases, with or without subsidies.
We use the data compiled from the USPTO patent and patent citations concerning the patented knowledge intensive technologies in three areas: cryptography, image analysis and data processing/software. The data is restricted to those patents between the years 1980-2003 that have two or more assignees, i.e. we consider only joint patents. We find some evidence that technological or product market proximity of partners in R&D alliance matters but whether the closeness generates more or less valuable innovations depends on the technology field. Our data further suggest that the most valuable innovations are generated when there is a certain level of prior patenting experience of the individual innovation partners. Interestingly, the prior patenting experience of the pairs of firms filing the joint patent does not seem to matter. It thus seems that learning from the prior joint patenting that creates more value for innovations is rather firm-specific than alliance-specific. Our findings on prior joint patenting experience generally hint that not only strategic benefits, and those benefits related to the management of joint patenting, can be gained from the R&D alliance experience.
