This paper provides some new theoretical speculations and empirical evidence on the relationship between design, innovation and economic performance at the firm level. We posit that design investments may provide firms with a higher capacity of introducing product/process innovations, but that...

The COVID-19 pandemic presented great challenges, but also opportunities, to SMEs across Europe. We examine how the "European Innovation Champions" successfully absorbed and reacted to the shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Five different paradoxical behaviors (i.e., planning, liquidity,...

This paper provides first empirical evidence of the joint effects that innovation strategies and human resource management practices exert on firm growth. By exploiting unique information from a large sample of Italian manufacturing companies in the very recent years, it shows that investing in...

In this paper, we develop a new firm-level measure of distance to the productivity frontier that accounts for international technology spillovers stemming from the use of imported intermediate goods. The trade-weighted technological distance to frontier is matched with sector- and country-level...

Many industrialized countries in Europe and North America have experienced a steady decline in the manufacturing sector over the last few decades. Amid growing concerns that outsourcing and offshoring have destabilized European economies, policymakers have suggested that a large manufacturing...

This paper contributes with new findings to the literature on corporate research and development (R&D) intensity decomposition by examining the effects of several parameters on R&D intensity and investigating its comparative distribution among top R&D firms, sectors and world regions/countries....

This paper investigates the sectoral dynamics of the major economies during the last decade through the lens of the top 1000 R&D investors worldwide and looks at how firms' demographics are related to sector distribution. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the EU corporate R&D...

This paper investigates the links between the market capability of top corporate R&D investors (EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboards), as captured by trademark data and their economic performance in terms of net sales growth. It provides empirical evidence to better understand the extent to...

Private sector R&D is largely concentrated in a few multinational companies (MNCs), which thus play an important role in the creation of knowledge and technology in the economy. The mobility of labor between these firms and the rest of the economy is therefore an important mechanism for the...

This study examines the on-going structural changes in the international organisation of corporate R&D and innovative (RDI) activities. Insights are mainly drawn from interviews made to innovation representatives and managers of large R&D-investing companies in 2017 in the frame of the European...