The importance of SMEs in Europe's innovation process can be seen in both the academic and the political arena. Adopted in June 2008, the 'Small Business Act' for Europe reflects the Commission's political will to recognise the central role of SMEs in the EU economy and was the first to put in...

The globalisation of R&D activities has continued to grow as companies are increasingly trying to capture knowledge and market opportunities internationally. The rapid evolution of national economies and the ways to conduct knowledge-intensive businesses has brought researchers and analysts to...

The literature has pointed to different causes to explain the productivity gap between Europe and United States in the last decades. This paper tests the hypothesis that the lower European productivity performance in comparison with the US can be explained not only by a lower level of corporate...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between a firm's R&D expenditures considered as an investment in knowledge, and its productivity, looking at sectoral peculiarities which may emerge; to this end, we use a large unique longitudinal database consisting of 1,809 US and...

The 3% Action Plan of the Lisbon Agenda was adopted with the aim of making Europe more innovative through increases in both private and public R&D spending. R&D forms an important part of innovation activities, but ignores many other activities. However, the policy focus on R&D investment means...

This research investigates deals with the impact of various innovation activities on innovation output by using Spanish CIS3 data on 3,247 innovative firms and applying several Knowledge Production Functions. It is confirmed that different innovation activities lead to differences in both the...