This paper provides some new theoretical speculations and empirical evidence on the relationship between design, innovation and economic performance at the firm level. We posit that design investments may provide firms with a higher capacity of introducing product/process innovations, but that...

We analyse determinants of an enterprise's decision to offshore R&D activities using a novel data set for enterprises in Ireland over the period 2001-2006. Our results suggest that, on average, other things equal, enterprises integrated in international production and innovation networks, and...

This paper uses European firm-level survey data to provide some robust empirical evidence that suppliers engaged in production to order (PTO) for foreign firms are more likely to introduce product innovations than those engaged in PTO for domestic firms, even when differences in size, R&D and...

This study investigates how corporate R&D evolves in the light of the contemporary economic crisis. We study empirical evidence from past downturns, discuss the relevant literature, and perform an empirical analysis of recent business survey data (collected during 2009). Pivotal for our...

Economic globalisation has given rise to two types of networks that stretch out across OECD and emerging economies. At the one side, global value chains (GVCs) can be thought of as the “material” transfers of goods and services (final as well as intermediate) across borders. At the other...