A structural analysis of the German economy is complemented by an analysis of the potential which is maybe not yet ready for economic use. Germany's science and research systems have great potential which industries have not yet used. The structural link between Germany's innovation and science...

Search theory which originated from operations research was first introduced into microeconomics in the 1960s. Typical applications are the commodities' markets, investment fields or labour markets. Search theory can replace the model of frictionless transactions between purchasers and suppliers...

The paper reviews models of innovation diffusion as the basis for a methodology to analyse business cases for new products and processes. The review is based on a categorization of the models' hypotheses and assumptions. The proposed analytical approach has three steps: First, qualitative...

The paper examines the utility of science and technology (S&T) indicators for the evaluation of research and development (R&D) programmes. The main objective is to contribute to improved evaluation by quantitative information not being provided by the supported institutions or persons. Thus, S&T...

New operational definitions of incremental innovation, standard innovation, and radical innovation, are constructed using our ‘technometric benchmarking’ model. Based on this definition, optimal incremental innovation is formulated as a linear programming problem. The model is illustrated by...

The basic juridical problems of patents are explained in order to identify systematic restrictions of the legal protection and thus of patent indicators. The analysis focuses on patents for plants and animals as a central part of innovations in agro-related biotechnology. A statistical...

How efficiently do countries translate scientific and technological excellence into export comparative advantage? Here the use of science and technology in generating exports is first modelled as a two-stage process. A variant of linear programming (data envelopment analysis, DEA) is then...