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 claimed...

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 paper investigates the extent to which outward FDI affect the MNC's capacity of entering (and remaining in) the club of top R&D world investors, benefiting from performance gains in both financial and economic markets. By merging the European Industrial Research and Innovation Scoreboard...

The paper investigates the impact that the multinational scope of firms' activities can have on their productivity. First, we argue that such an impact is both direct and indirect, and that the latter is channelled through higher incentives to invest in R&D. Second, we posit that the composition...

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...