The Nature of Innovation and the Origin of Technological Spillovers

The aim of this paper is to show that innovations are the result of complex interactions between different private and public agents. For that, we identify the nature of the information sources that firms use to produce their innovations and assess the impact of these different sources on the results of the innovation process. We develop an econometric sequential model dealing successively with the innovation decision and the nature of innovation and use recent French data coming from the 1997 Community Innovation Survey. The main results are that innovation is not the result of isolated agents and that firms use very differently information sources according to the novelty degree of their innovation