Established industries, which constitute by far the largest share of the manufacturing and service sectors in most developed economies, are on balance reasonably innovative. They engage in frequent changes in both product and process technologies which, although perhaps less spectacular (in a...

The aim of this chapter is to explore some of the issues and to underline the main aspects that have been focussed upon in the PILOT project. We begin the chapter with consideration of why so much academic and policy attention has been paid, in our view disproportionately, to high-tech...

The papers collected in this volume are part of the OECD National Innovation Systems project, which seeks to explore the possibilities for the quantification of systems approaches to innovation. Systems approaches see innovation as a complex collective phenomenon, characterised by interactions...

It is frequently claimed that innovation is essential to economic performance, but such claims are usually quite general and abstract. Often they apply indistinguishably to economic growth generally, to the competitiveness of national economies, to the profitability, survival and growth of...

The top 500 industrial R&D spenders outside the European Union increased their R&D investment by 3.9 percent to 195.6 billion [euro] in fiscal 2003. In contrast, the EU top 500 cut their R&D spending 2.0 percent to 100.8 billion [euro]. The compound annual growth rate for 2000-2003 was 1.2...

It is often argued that high tech industries drive growth processes, and that they are the sources of growth in output, employment and productivity in the knowledge economy. This is a special case of a more general argument that economic growth is characterized by the creation of new and the...

Innovation is novelty - it involves doing new things in new ways. So new products, new processes, new organizational methods, new services, and so on, are all part of innovation. Technological innovation transforms and improves the technical attributes and performance characteristics of products...

This chapter discusses an approach to the rationale and operations of innovation policy from a 'systems' perspective, focusing on functions performed by an innovation system. The systems approach stems from a key insight of innovation studies, which is that innovation by firms cannot be...

Globalisation is an ill-defined and haphazardly used term that usually refers - with many differences of nuance and emphasis - to three related phenomena of the world economy at the present time. The first is the spread of neo-liberal economic doctrines and (to a lesser extent) practices. The...

This paper examines whether there are differences in private R&D investment performance between the EU and the US and, if so, why. The study is based on data from the 2008 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. The investigation assesses the effects of several very distinct factors that can...