The paper investigates the barriers to collaboration in terms of hidden transaction costs, by deriving the distribution of the operating costs and sunk costs associated with firms’ investment choices in R&D and innovation activities with or without a research partner. To retrieve both fixed...

The effect of a firm's size is analysed in relation with the probability of applying for a patent. We worked on the identification of a firm's minimum size, a threshold needed to formally protect an innovation by legal means. Below this minimum size the costs associated with protection are so...

The present note contains an explorative and introductory analysis of the patenting activity exhibited by the top 100 companies of the IRI Scoreboard, and intends to identify strengths and weaknesses for its possible future extension to the whole Scoreboard. With respect to these companies,...

Why is it that European firms are less present as leading innovators in new ICT sectors? The most common factor raised in the literature to explain the differences in dynamic structure between the US and the EU is a greater willingness on the part of the US financial markets to fund projects in...

Innovation is at the centre of the EU's growth strategy for the coming decade (EU2020). New technologies and their adoption by EU farmers are essential in maintaining European agriculture competitive in a global world. Within this context, nanotechnology represents an innovative technology with...

The present paper studies the relationship between R&D investment and firm productivity growth by explicitly accounting for non-linearities in the R&D-productivity relationship and inter-sectoral firm heterogeneity. In order to address these issues, we employ a two step estimation approach, and...

The paper aims at estimating the innovation impact of the vertical integration of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) into manufacturing. Referring to the vertically integrated sectors of an economy allows innovative knowledge, which is transferred directly and indirectly from KIBS to...

The rise of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) may be considered as one of the decisive trends of economic evolution of industrialised countries in recent decades. This paper uses the concept of vertical integrated sectors and the subsystem approach to input-output matrix analysis to...