Liliana Herrera

Firm size and innovation policy

This study analyses the additionality effects of R&D subsidies on innovation activity: specifically, the allocation of in-house R&D expenditures and economic returns from the innovation process. The magnitude of these effects has been established in the context of a common variable informing the design of innovation policies: firm size. The study reveals that regardless of firm size, public funding stimulates investment within the firm’s technological domain (applied research and technological development), but did not expand the technological knowledge frontier (basic research). The findings also show that R&D subsidies have different additionality effects upon economic returns derived from the innovation process. Although subsidies increased private R&D effort quite significantly in small firms, this only prompted an expansion in the sale of products new for the firm. However, large subsidized firms which only increased investment in technological development improved the sale of products new to the market.

THE INFLUENCE OF R&D COOPERATION ON INNOVATORY EFFORT

Abstract Nowadays, in the development of new products, it becomes necessary to recognise the importance wielded by agents external to the firm as a source of innovation activities. The complexity and dynamism of present environments make it obligatory to complement the internal knowledge base with those from outside, and thus a distinction is made between internal and external innovation sources. Since the former have been adequately studied and analysed in the literature, the present work aims to make progress in knowing the latter. For this purpose, an analysis has been made of the influence of 9 types of cooperation with external agents on three indicators of innovatory effort in 20 industrial and service sectors in Spain. These indicators have been: the total intensity of innovation activities, the intramural R&D intensity and the extramural Rol) intensity. The findings indicate the existence of very diverse effects resulting from the chosen cooperation partner.

Effects of customer cooperation on knowledge generation activities and innovation results of firms

This study has analyzed the effect of cooperation with customers on firms’ innovation activities. This issue is particularly novel and important as customers provide information that will be very useful to generate new products and to make the innovation process more efficient. This paper makes important contributions to the literature by analyzing how the cooperation with customers affected the creation of technological knowledge and the economic returns derived from such knowledge. Results have shown that firms cooperating with customers increased investments geared toward expanding the technological knowledge base within the firms technological domain yet managed to reduce investments oriented to extend the frontier of technological knowledge, at least in the short term. It was also observed, that this cooperation had positive effects on firms’ economic returns derived from the sales of products new for the market allowing companies to maintain a competitive advantage over their rivals.

Buenas prácticas de innovación: un estudio exploratorio de empresas tecnológicas en el sector audiovisual español

Resumen El principal objetivo de esta investigacion es contribuir a la comprension de la capacidad de innovacion. Mas concretamente, la investigacion se centra en describir las practicas utilizadas para construir y desarrollar la capacidad de innovacion en dos empresas innovadoras de base tecnologica (EIBT) del sector audiovisual espanol. Por medio de un estudio de casos multiple basado, principalmente, en entrevistas con los responsables de los proyectos de desarrollo de nuevos productos, se ha identificado un conjunto de 17 practicas clasificadas en tres dimensiones: estrategia de innovacion, cultura innovadora y estructura del proceso de innovacion. Este conjunto de practicas ha promovido la obtencion de buenos resultados en los proyectos de desarrollo de nuevos productos en las empresas estudiadas.