Recent trends in the economics of innovation literature through the lens of Industrial and Corporate Change

Literature on the economics of innovation has been in constant change. We quantitatively assess recent trends in this literature in terms of research topics and types of research. Departing from a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative survey of influential innovation handbooks, this paper draws on the review and analysis of all articles published in Industrial and Corporate Change, since its foundation to 2009. Our results reveal that ‘Conceptual/Economic Thought’, ‘Intellectual Property Rights’, and ‘Measurement of Innovation’ topics have shown striking trends over the period in analysis. Moreover, although both ‘Appreciative plus Empirical’ and ‘Formal plus Empirical’ types of research have grown, suggesting a ‘virtuous’ trend towards the analytical and predictive efficacy of theory, purely ‘Empirical’ studies have markedly increased, which may indicate that a connection between theory and empirics is (increasingly) lacking in the field of the economics of innovation.