Nuria González Álvarez

Research, development and growth in state-owned enterprises: empirical evidence from Ecuador

ABSTRACT Investment in R&D is essential for the survival and growth of organizations. Recent literature has focused on the study of effects of R&D on the growth of private companies. However, there is no research studying the effects of R&D on the growth of Latin American public companies. This paper estimates, using an endogenous growth model, the effect of investments in R&D on sales growth in public enterprises of Ecuador. Data corresponding to a sample of 86 public companies have been taken from the Survey of Activities of Science and Technology (ACTI) of Ecuador for the period 2012 to 2014. These data are estimated by OLS. The results show that there is a statistically significant positive relation between investment in research and development and the growth of sales in public companies.

Factores que determinan la cooperación con clientes en innovación

The aim of this paper is to investigate the determinants of R&D cooperation between manufacturing firms and a particular group of external stakeholders: their customers and users. The crux of our analysis are two variables that have been acknowledged in the literature as important factors for this kind of cooperation but that have been studied from a purely theoretical perspective: 1) sticky information (information costly to acquire, transfer and use) and, 2) heterogeneous needs of the market. The present study analyzes deeply these variables and our results confirm that both factors have a significant influence on cooperation with customers. R&D experience, cooperation with other stakeholders, absorptive capacity, product innovation and foreign ownership are also shown to influence on the likelihood of customer cooperation.