Innovation in the European Union remains weak according to a number of key ‘input’ indicators, especially R&D investment by the business sector, and there are relatively few signs of progress. From a firm-level perspective, Europe’s innovation gap relative to the US results from an...

The paper investigates the barriers to collaboration in terms of hidden transaction costs, by deriving the distribution of the operating costs and sunk costs associated with firms’ investment choices in R&D and innovation activities with or without a research partner. To retrieve both fixed...

The paper aims to show how policy makers can stimulate firms' cooperation with research organisations in innovation. We argue that the administration of an R&D subsidy can be effective. Furthermore, this should be more so for extra-regional than intra-regional cooperation. The firms' propensity...

The paper aims at extending the analysis of the firm’s absorptive capacity (AC) by taking stock of its manifold nature. Innovation cooperation is recognised as one of its antecedents, along with R&D, but with different possible outcomes, depending on the kind of partner. Human capital is...

The globalisation of R&D activities has continued to grow as companies are increasingly trying to capture knowledge and market opportunities internationally. The rapid evolution of national economies and the ways to conduct knowledge-intensive businesses has brought researchers and analysts to...

The present paper studies the relationship between R&D investment and firm productivity growth by explicitly accounting for non-linearities in the R&D-productivity relationship and inter-sectoral firm heterogeneity. In order to address these issues, we employ a two step estimation approach, and...

The paper aims at estimating the innovation impact of the vertical integration of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) into manufacturing. Referring to the vertically integrated sectors of an economy allows innovative knowledge, which is transferred directly and indirectly from KIBS to...

The rise of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) may be considered as one of the decisive trends of economic evolution of industrialised countries in recent decades. This paper uses the concept of vertical integrated sectors and the subsystem approach to input-output matrix analysis to...