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A number of countries have an extremely low percentage of foreign scientists studying or working in the country. Particularly notable is the virtual absence of foreign scientists studying or working in India, Italy (3.0%), Japan (5.0%), Brazil (7.1%) and Spain (7.3%).

National incentive policies relate to increases in research article submissions and publications in Science . Many national governments have implemented policies providing incentives for researchers to publish, especially in highly ranked international journals. Although still the top publishing nation, the United States has seen its share of publications decline from 34.2% in 1995 to 27.6% in 2007 as the number of articles published by U.S. scientists and engineers has plateaued and that of other countries has grown ( 1 , 2 ). Hicks ( 3 ) argues that the two events are not unrelated: The decline in the relative performance of the United States relates to increased international competition engendered by newly adopted incentives that have crowded out some work by U.S. authors.

In this paper, we study the determinants of the spread charged by banks under a UK policy intervention scheme, aimed at supporting access to the credit market for small firms through guarantee backed loans. We exploit a unique dataset containing data on 29,266 guarantee backed loans under the UK SFLG scheme over the period 2000 to 2005. Results suggest that lower spreads are offered for loans of larger amounts and higher durations, for service firms, for larger firms, and for those located in the most advanced regions. Higher spreads are applied to high-tech manufacturing firms and to loans issued for working capital purposes. We also find that the presence of other extant debt is associated with a relatively higher spread and that this effect is especially significant for the subset of firms that have reached a maximum debt capacity based on collateralized assets. Further, we also find that the higher the incidence of the publicly guaranteed debt over the total amount of outstanding loans, the lower, on average, the spread. However, an increase in the guaranteed coverage leads to a contraction in the spread only for loans aimed at covering working capital needs rather than investments.

The paper is aimed at obtaining a better understanding of the role played by universities in the technological development and specialization of the territories in which they are located. Our methodology adopts both quantitative and qualitative techniques. First, we provide evidence of the interplay between the technological specialization of universities and the evolution of the technological trajectories of firms located in Italian NUTS3 regions. We also propose an original taxonomy of university-region technological evolution processes that leads to the identification of four possible models and reveals substantial heterogeneity in university-region specialization processes. Finally, we analyze the underlying mechanisms of university technology transfer activities in more detail, by using the Politecnico di Torino as a single case study. The case examines how the university has changed its strategy by modifying the mix of exploitation and exploration strategies to continue increasing the technological proximity with the local ecosystem under conditions of rapid and radical change. Our work offers important implications for both regional technology policies and the management of universities.

The analysis of social interactions as drivers of economic dynamics represents a growing field within the economics of complexity. Social interactions are a specific form of interdependence whereby the changes in the behavior of other agents affect utility functions for households and production functions for producers. In this paper, we apply the general concept of social interactions to the area of the economics of innovation and we articulate the view that knowledge interactions play a central role in the generation of new technological knowledge so that innovation becomes the emergent property of a system, rather than the product of individual actions. In particular, we articulate and test the hypothesis that different layers of knowledge interactions play a crucial role in determining the rate of technological change that each firm is able to introduce. The paper presents an empirical analysis of firm level total factor productivity (TFP) for a sample of 7,020 Italian manufacturing companies observed during the years 1996–2005. This will enable us to identify the distinctive role of regional, inter-industrial and localized intra-industrial knowledge interactions as distinctive and significant determinants, together with internal research and innovation efforts, of changes in firm level TFP.

The analysis of the characteristics of firms helps to understand the causes and consequences of the direction of technological change. Firms differ substantially with respect to the type of technological knowledge they can generate and exploit through technological innovations. This in turn has major effects on the direction of technological change they are able to introduce. Large firms able to command the recombinant generation of codified knowledge with a strong scientific base are more likely to introduce neutral technological changes that consist in a shift effect of production functions. Small firms that rely more on tacit and external knowledge are more likely to rely on technologies directed toward the most intensive use of locally abundant production factors. The effects of this difference in terms of the resulting total factor productivity growth are important and can be grasped only when the changes in output elasticity of production factors in growth accounting are properly appreciated. The empirical evidence for a sample of 6,600 Italian firms observed between 1996 and 2005 confirms that large firms introduced mainly neutral technological changes while small firms with lower levels of profitability introduced biased technological changes.

This paper investigates the dynamics of productivity in a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms, focusing on the determinants of firm-level persistence in time of high total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates relative to the corresponding sectoral distributions. In particular, we assess the impact of both the internal characteristics of companies, including size and management strategies, and external systemic conditions, including business cycles and regional innovation performance. In order to disentangle the effects of the mix of internal and systemic factors in shaping firm-level persistence, we implement both transition probability matrices and dynamic probit models. Results reveal the presence of significant persistence in TFP growth rates. Such persistence turns out to be path-dependent since it is shaped by a number of complementary and contingent factors that locally affect the dynamics of the process.

This paper provides novel evidence on co-evolution patterns of the technological specialization of innovation activities of firms and academic institutions located in the same European region during the years from 2003 to 2014. We exploit a novel and unique dataset merging data on EU-funded R&D projects, universities, patents, and economic region-level data for a large sample of universities and firms co-located in geographical areas at the third level of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS3), which correspond to a sub-regional scale of analysis. Our results indicate the presence of substantial heterogeneity across the analyzed EU regions with respect to the co-evolution of industry and academia specializations. In particular, we find that the specialization into a new technological domain is led by the local academic research system only in a few cases. We also document that a number of factors, at both the university and region levels, are associated with convergent or divergent processes in the relative specialization of the innovation activities carried out by firms and universities co-located in the same region.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine, for a sample of ten corporations in three industries (i.e. automotive suppliers, semiconductors, and computer networks), the different strategies that firms undertake when acquiring patent-protected technologies. In particular, the authors analyze and compare two alternative channels for patent acquisition: markets for technology (MFT) and merger and acquisition (M&A) processes. Design/methodology/approach The authors implement two types of analyses, at both patent and firm level. First, the authors perform an econometric analysis to evaluate whether acquired patented technologies differ in their patent bibliographic characteristics with respect to patent-protected technologies that have been developed internally by the examined firms. The authors then investigate the presence of differences in the characteristics of transacted patents acquired in the MFT or by means of M&A activities. Second, the authors take a firm-level perspective and examine the technology acquisition strategies adopted by selected companies to identify the presence of common patterns, industry-driven specificities and firm peculiarities. Findings The authors find that acquired patented technologies are, on average, more complex, of higher technical merit and the corresponding patents show a higher legal robustness. Econometric results reveal the presence of differences between M&A and MFT patents: the latter seem to protect less complex, and thus easier to trade, inventions. The analysis of the patterns of patent acquisitions at the firm level shows the presence of different strategies for the external sourcing of patented technologies, based on whether acquired patents protect core or non-core technology areas of the analyzed firms. Such patterns are discussed in the light of the different streams of the literature on intellectual property (IP) management. Originality/value This paper makes use of a new and comprehensive data set of the US patent transactions that took place between 2002 and 2010. The authors added detailed data on the evolution of the corporate trees of analyzed firms. The paper contributes to the literature on technology acquisitions and MFT by examining the different channels for patented technology acquisitions. The issue represents an emerging area of interest in the field of IP management.