Suchergebnisse

peer-reviewed ; INTRODUCTION: In early 2006 the Irish Government announced a Pilot Initiative for Collaborative Projects from Industry-Led Networks, the latest in a series of policies on 'business networking' that date back to the mid-1980s. The purpose of this chapter is to describe and comment on those policies by reviewing the previous literature (both academic and policy documents). What we stress is that over the years and across different policies, the precise focus has varied, in terms of networking aims and objectives and networking forms.1 We appreciate that there is considerable confusion in the wider discussions as to the meaning of 'networks' and 'networking' in a business context, and indeed this has been recognized before in analysis of Irish policy (for example, in Forfás (2004)). However, our approach is to avoid much of that confusion by simply centring discussion on those (inter-related and overlapping) areas of policy that the literature on Ireland consistently addresses when considering 'business networking', namely: 'linkages' between 'local' firms and transnational/multinational corporation (TNCs); training networks; research and development (R&D) networks; inter-firm cooperation processes more widely. These four topics are respectively the prime focus of successive Sections in this Chapter. Our discussion culminates in a consideration of the prospects for the successful impact of the 2006 Pilot. We welcome the initiative as seeming to represent a welcome seed-change in policy, and offer preliminary insights into how it might be evaluated. In doing so we introduce the notion of 'public interest evaluation' (PIE), intended to assess the extent to which public interests are served by a particular policy. Part of the idea is that whilst the Pilot is focused on (to some extent) measurable benefits to participating enterprises from networking projects, it might also be desirable to consider other effects on wider publics. ; ACCEPTED ; Peer reviewed

The evaluation of industrial policy interventions has attracted increasing policy and academic attention in recent years. Despite the widespread consensus regarding the need for evaluation, the issue of how to evaluate, and the associated methodological considerations, continue to be issues of considerable debate. The authors develop an approach to estimate the net additionally of financial assistance from Enterprise Ireland to indigenously owned firms in Ireland for the period 2000 to 2002. With a sample of Enterprise Ireland assisted firms, an innovative, self-assessment, in-depth, face-to-face, interview methodology was adopted. The authors also explore a way of incorporating the indirect benefits of assistance into derived deadweight estimates—an issue which is seldom discussed in the context of deadweight estimates. They conclude by reflecting on the key methodological lessons learned from the evaluation process, and highlight some pertinent evaluation issues which should form the focus of much future discussion in this field of research.

peer-reviewed ; Policy-makers at regional, national and European Union (EU) levels of governance use a variety of subsidy programmes to stimulate firm-level innovation. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates three important issues that have not received sufficient attention in the literature: (1) whether evaluating the impact of subsidies from each individual source is biased by ignoring firms that receive a mix of subsidies from different sources at the same point in time; (2) whether receiving a mix of subsidies from regional, national and EU sources crowds out firm-level innovation; and (3) if effective, whether subsidy mix stimulates forms of innovation with higher private or social returns. The findings demonstrate that ignoring subsidy mix significantly biases evaluations of subsidies from individual sources. Moreover, subsidy mix can be a highly effective means of stimulating forms of firm-level innovation with the highest social returns, precisely where market and systemic failures are most acute

peer-reviewed ; Promoting Research and Development (R&D) and innovative activity is a key element of the EU Lisbon Agenda and is seen as playing a central part in stimulating economic development. In this paper we argue that, even allowing for benevolent policy-makers, informational asymmetries can lead to a misallocation of public support for R&D, hence government policy failure, with the potential to exacerbate preexisting market failures. Initially, we explore alternative allocation mechanisms for public support, which can help to minimize the scale of these government policy failures. Of these mechanisms (grants, tax credits, or allocation rules based on past performance), our results suggest that none is universally most efficient. Rather, the effectiveness of each allocation rule depends on the severity of financial constraints and on the level of innovative capabilities of the firms themselves. ; ACCEPTED ; peer-reviewed

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate how the innovation expectations of public financiers are related to realized patents. The analysis is based on a novel data set of collaborative R&D projects subsidized by the Finnish Agency of Technology and Innovation (Tekes) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) during the period 2000–2004. Innovation expectations are measured using reports submitted by Tekes experts during ex ante assessments of projects. Our probit model results reveal that Tekes' patent expectations are positively related to realized patents for projects led by private firms (but not by public organizations). For large organizations, Tekes' innovation expectations are better at predicting patenting.