Helmut Gassler

An Exploration into the Determinants of Patent Activities: Some Empirical Evidence for Austria

The recent computerization of the Austrian Patent Office in the mid-1980s has made it possible now to analyse the patenting behaviour at the firm level over a certain time period. This makes patents an easily accessible, quantitative indicator of patented inventions and, more generally, a proxy for the early stages of the innovation process. This paper attempts to analyse patenting activities and their determinants in the Austrian manufacturing sector. The data used are at the firm level which are based on a merger of the information provided by two data sources: patent data provided by the Austrian Patent Office, and company data from the statistical information system of the Austrian Research Centre, Seibersdorf. A conceptual framework for analysing patenting behaviour is developed. By using a mixture of simple cross-tabulations and multivariate logit analysis, differences between establishments in patent application are identified.

The Role of Space in the Creation of Knowledge in Austria. An Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis

The relationship between knowledge spillovers and space is extremely complex and, at the current state of research, only partially understood. This is partly due to the fact that knowledge spillovers are difficult to measure. The chapter makes a modest attempt to shed some light on the role of space in the creation of technological knowledge in Austria. The study is exploratory rather than explanatory in nature and based on descriptive and exploratory techniques such as Moran’s I test for spatial autocorrelation and the Moran scatterplot. Clusters of the output of the knowledge creation process (measured in terms of patent counts) are compared with spatial concentration patterns of two input measures of knowledge production: private R&D and academic research. In addition, employment in manufacturing is considered to capture agglomeration economies. The analysis is based on data aggregated for two-digit ISIC industries and at the level of Austrian political districts. It explores the extent to which knowledge spillovers are mediated by spatial proximity in Austria. A time-space comparison makes it possible to study whether divergence or convergence processes in knowledge creation have occurred in the past two decades. As in the case of any exploratory data analysis, the findings need to be treated with caution and should be viewed only as an initial pre-modelling stage for Chapter 11.