1,721,241 research outputs found
Financial constraints to investing in intangibles: Do innovative and non-innovative firms differ?
No full textThis paper investigates the extent to which financial constraints on investments in intangible
activities differ with respect to the kind of intangible and to the firms’ innovative status.
Through an original pseudo-panel extension of a recent European Innobarometer survey,
we are capable to address these research questions by attenuating the risks of reverse causality
and simultaneity bias and to obtain interesting new results. Financial barriers significantly
hamper the firms’ investments in intangibles with respect to R&D, design, software,
and organisation or business process improvements. With respect to branding and
reputation, and training, instead, financial constraints do not emerge to hinder the relative
investments. Furthermore, while innovative firms tend to invest more in intangibles, the
hampering role of financial barriers does not seem to differ between innovative and noninnovative
firms. Financial barriers reduce firms’ investments in intangibles selectively, but
the strength of this effect is the same in deterring and in restraining their possible innovative
use by non-innovative and innovative firms, respectively
Design centrality, design investments and innovation performance: an empirical analysis of European firms
No full textThis article provides new evidence on the relationship between design and innovation performance at thefirm level. In particular, we integrate previous analyses of the link between design investments and innov-ation by considering the extent to which firms put design at the center of their business activities.Moreover, we distinguish between the effect of design on innovation and its effect on the success of in-novation, as captured by firms’ innovative turnover. The use of the European Innobarometer survey, cov-ering a unique set of questions on the topic, allows us to test a set of hypotheses about these relationshipson a large sample of firms. The results show that a firm’s approach to design plays an important role inits propensity to innovate: the more central the role of design within a firm, the higher the likelihood itinnovates. The same holds true when considering the share of turnover from innovation. However, salesassociated with innovation do not increase linearly with design investments, as we find a positive effectonly for firms investing intensively in design. Overall it emerges that the centrality of design is stronglyassociated with firms’ innovation performance, while design investmentpersehasamorenuancedrole
Intangible investments and innovation propensity: Evidence from the Innobarometer 2013
No full textThis paper investigates the innovation impact of intangible investments. Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, we argue that through intangible investments, companies acquire knowledge assets that increase their innovativeness. However, a greater innovation impact is expected from investing more in technological intangibles rather than in intangibles overall, and a greater one from using internal versus external resources. Through a new survey on a large sample of firms in 36 countries, accounting for different intangibles and addressing their endogeneity through proper instruments, these hypotheses are partially confirmed. Developing intangibles internally is actually the most innovation-impacting aspect, but not in manufacturing. Instead, by controlling for this choice and for that of investing in technological intangibles, the intensity of intangible resources is significant for innovation in manufacturing only. Policy/strategic implications about the need of readdressing the boost to intangible investments for the sake of innovation in Europe are drawn accordingly
The pro-export effect of sub-national migration networks: New evidence from Spanish provinces
Full text linkWe investigate the effect that subnational networks of immigrants
and emigrants had on exports from Spanish provinces (NUTS3) over the period of 2007–2016 by integrating state-of-the-art advances in the gravity model
literature. In particular, we allow for heterogeneity in provincial export capacity, which significantly reduces pro-export effects, and select the Poisson
Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood as the most suitable estimator according to diagnostic tests. When both immigration and emigration are instrumented, the
pro-export effect of immigrants found by previous studies vanishes and that of
emigrants, instead, appears appreciable. The results we obtained suggest that
over the period that encompasses the double-deep crisis, immigrants did not
show significant information and enforcement effects in the considered context, while the effects of emigrant demand for home-country goods may have
been important. The prevalence of emigrant over immigrant effects appears
attributable to a change in the composition of the migration stocks over the
considered period of crisis
The production function of top R&D investors: Accounting for size and sector heterogeneity with quantile estimations
No full textAbstractThis paper aims at showing how quantile estimations can make the analysis of the firm's production function better able to deal with the innovation implications of production. In order to do this, we provide evidence of how top world R&D investors differ in the production impact of their inputs and in their rate of technical change. We use the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard and carry out a quantile estimation of an augmented Cobb–Douglas production function for a panel of more than 1000 companies, covering the 2002–2010 period. The results of the pooled sample are contrasted with those obtained from the estimates for different groups of economic sectors. Returns to scale are bounded by the size of the firm, but to an extent that decreases with the technological intensity of the sector. The output return of knowledge capital is the largest, irrespective of firm size, but in high-tech sectors only. Elsewhere, physical capital is the pivotal factor, although with size variations. The investigated firms also appear different in their technical progress: embodied in mid-high and low/mid-low tech sectors, and disembodied in high-tech sectors
Design and eco-innovation: micro-evidence from the Eurobarometer survey
Full text linkThis paper investigates the role of design in making firms eco-innovate. Going beyond the ‘packed’ approach of environmental studies about ‘eco-design’, we maintain that the eco-innovative impact of design is correlated with the firm’s decision to invest in it. In turn, design investment is assumed connected with the use firms make of design. By pooling the Eurobarometer 2015 and 2016 surveys, we test for these arguments with respect to a sample of nearly 4500 European and non-European (US and Switzerland) manufacturing firms. Results confirm that the firms’ capacity of eco-innovating increases when they invest in design, also by making this investment dependent on the role of design within the firm. The relationship between eco-innovation and design appears robust with respect to the different kinds of ‘eco-innovators’ that the Eurobarometer enables us to consider, while some interesting variability emerges when splitting the sample by group of countries and industries
Design and environmental technologies: Does ‘green-matching’ actually help?
No full textThis paper investigates whether a green kind of design helps firms increase their capabilities for inventing in the
environmental domain and whether it does so more than ‘standard’ design. It also investigates whether the effect
of ‘green-matching’ between new design and technologies is conditional on firms’ innovative capabilities, as
reflected by their R&D expenditure. We address these research questions with respect to the world’s top R&D
investors, looking at their intellectual property rights at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
and proposing an original textual identification of green designs and trademarks. We find that green design
increases environmental inventions by top R&D investors, and to a greater extent than non-environmental ones.
Standard design also stimulates environmental inventions, but to a lesser extent than green design. The ‘greenmatching’
actually helps, but internal innovative capabilities are required to make it effective: a green-tech
‘prize’ emerges from green design, but only once a minimum threshold of R&D expenditure has been reached
Outsourcing and Transaction Costs in "Real" Time and Space: Evidence for a Province of Emilia-Romagna (Italy)
No full textThe aim of the paper is to investigate how far transaction cost based explanations of outsourcing interact with the industrial relations of the firm. The theoretical background which underpins the paper is that this kind of interaction reveals an important aspect of what has been termed the “governance inseparability” of the firm, and of the way in which transaction costs actually work in “real time”. Theoretical correlations between outsourcing decisions and outsourcing variables related to transaction
costs and industrial relations are formulated and then tested with
respect to a representative cross-sectional sample of firms of a local production system in Emilia Romagna (that is, Reggio Emilia). The main result of the paper is that outsourcing decisions are indeed affected by the organizational and industrial relations typical of the context firms are embedded in. In particular, it emerges that unions, so to say, push the brake pedal at the outset, but when outsourcing occurs, they are involved or at least informed
What drives (or hampers) outsourcing? Evidence for a local production system of Emilia Romagna
No full textThe paper investigates the drivers of the outsourcing decisions of firms located in a specific local production system. Different kinds of drivers are considered drawing on different strands of the literature, considering the firm from an organizational point of view, and as a production, industrial and innovation unit of analysis. Theoretical correlations between outsourcing decisions and variables are formulated and tested with respect to a representative cross-section sample of the firms in Reggio Emilia, a local production system in Emilia Romagna. The main result of the paper is that, in the local context investigated, transaction costs do not seem to be a significant driver of outsourcing. The decision to externalize is rather driven by other arguments, strongly based on the resource-competence approach, factors such as the need for tapping into the providers to promote technological innovation. On the other hand, these drivers are contrasted by the industrial relations of the firms, as workers and workers' representatives significantly hamper it, possibly fearing job losses, or at most expect to be involved in the relative decision in order to make it possible or even spur it. These results have important implications, both at the research level-at which they suggest to complement the transaction cost analysis of outsourcing with that of other approaches-and at the management level-at which they support the thesis that external organizational innovations, such as outsourcing, cannot neglect internal organizational aspects, such as human resource management and industrial relations. © 2009 Taylor & Francis
Le strategie innovative delle imprese manifatturiere in Emilia-Romagna
No full textNegli ultimi venti anni l’economia dei principali paesi industrializzati è stata attraversata da una molteplicità di fenomeni innovativi. Le caratteristiche distintive dei processi innovativi sono almeno tre: il ruolo prevalente della conoscenza incorporata in capitale materiale e immateriale; l’associarsi dei cambiamenti organizzativi ai cambiamenti tecnologici incorporati in beni strumentali; la pervasività in contesti locali e globali del fenomeno innovativo declinato in termini tecno-organizzativi. Il nostro paese, anche in contesti regionali storicamente virtuosi, si confronta con difficoltà con i processi di cui sopra.
Negli anni recenti è noto come due tesi si siano confrontate circa le performance del sistema produttivo italiano. Da un lato la tesi del «declino», che enfatizza la perdita di competitività del sistema italiano attestato dai bassi tassi di crescita di medio periodo del reddito e dalla stagnazione della produttività, sia assoluta sia relativa se rapportata ai maggiori paesi industriali con cui il nostro paese si confronta (Banca d’Italia, 2003; Ciocca, 2003; Faini, 2004; Brandolini, Bugamelli, 2009). Dall’altro è stata contrapposta la tesi della «trasformazione», che evidenzia invece significativi cambiamenti di struttura e di comportamento delle imprese italiane negli ultimi dieci anni, cambiamenti che spiegherebbero il relativo successo del made in Italy sui mercati internazionali, attestato anche dalle buone performance delle esportazioni italiane in una fase lunga di euro forte (Fortis, Quadrio Curzio, 2006; Fortis, 2009; Quintieri, 2007; Coltorti, 2006; Ginzburg, 2005; Ginzburg, Bigarelli, 2008).
La trasposizione di tali tesi può essere effettuata anche al sistema produttivo dell'Emilia-Romagna, ma la chiave interpretativa dei risultati dell’economia regionale può assumere una sfumatura diversa e non attagliarsi perfettamente ad alcuna delle due tesi sopra ricordate. Il sistema produttivo regionale, nonostante abbia risentito pesantemente della attuale congiuntura negativa, ha mostrato anche forti caratteri di solidità strutturale, contenendo gli effetti della crisi sul mercato del lavoro e salvaguardando la robustezza del sistema industriale (Regione Emilia-Romagna, Unioncamere, 2009). Ciò che emerge con nitidezza dalla lettura dei dati aggregati, al di là dei risultati congiunturali, è che la performance del sistema produttivo dell’Emilia-Romagna risulta da due sentieri che appaiono abbastanza divergenti: da un lato i settori industriali che, trainati dalla componente estera della domanda, fanno registrare una crescita del valore aggiunto a tassi ben più elevati della media nazionale, con guadagni significativi anche in termini di occupazione; dall’altro, i settori del terziario che frenano la crescita con dinamiche della produttività spesso negative, compensate da una forte intensità occupazionale della crescita del valore aggiunto. Ne risulta ciò che definiamo una crescita sbilanciata a livello regionale negli ultimi anni: una crescita sostenuta dai settori industriali, che registrano più elevati tassi di crescita del valore aggiunto e anche dell’occupazione rispetto alla media nazionale, e sostenuto dall’andamento delle esportazioni, ma frenata dai settori dei servizi, che invece registrano dinamiche negative della produttività, pur se con andamenti occupazionali positivi
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