There is growing political pressure on universities to intensify their interaction with industry and to enlarge their own research funding options, in a context characterised by increasing constraints on public spending. However, whether the successful achievement of such a political desired...

This paper examines the intertemporal returns of patented inventions using estimates of patent value obtained from German employee inventors’ compensation records. The paper finds heterogeneity in the mean age and dispersion of the annual returns by technology and cumulative patent value....

This paper presents a quality index for patent systems. The index is composed of nine operational design components that shape the transparency and stringency of patent systems and affect the extent to which they comply with patentability conditions. Seven components are related to rules and...

Europe is perceived to lag behind the US in converting its academic results into economic outcomes. Using new survey data and controlling for standard factors affecting the productivity of Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), we find that European TTOs do not execute less licenses than US TTOs....

Barriers to innovation have mainly been studied in a single country context. This paper studies differences in the perception of innovation barriers between innovative and non-innovative firms for 18 EU countries. The countries are grouped by their distance to the technological frontier using...

We evaluate the impact of cooperation with public research on firms’ product and process innovations in France and Germany using Community Innovation Survey data from 2004 and 2008. We find that cooperating with public research increases product innovation, but has no effect on process...

By changing the level of competition and/or affecting the allocation of resources, institutions can play a very important role on innovation activity. In this paper we investigate the relative importance of institutional variation across European countries in explaining differences in their...

Innovating firms are likely to face several challenges and experience different types of barriers. In this paper we argue that it is necessary to distinguish between two kinds of barriers to innovation. The first corresponds to what we describe as revealed barriers and reflects the degree of...

This paper empirically investigates whether corporate governance practices implemented to align shareholders’ and managers’ interests affect the resources firms devote to R&D. Two databases – one on governance ratings and one on R&D investment – are merged to obtain a multi-country,...

R&D encompasses plenty of activities which are usually summarized under the terms of basic research, applied research and development. Although basic research is often associated with low appropriability it provides the fundamental basis for subsequent applied research and development....