Does it matter whether research is conducted by the private business rather than in universities or government research centres? While most of the attention of science and innovation policy in the last decades has explored the relevance of the interconnections between public and business players...

The new Global Innovation Scoreboard 2008 (GIS 2008) is developed.It aims at providing an overview on the main trends, results and determinants of the innovative performance of countries across the world. Compared to the 2008 European Innovation Scoreboard, the GIS 2008 uses older data (1995 –...

This paper examines the relationship between countries' international profile and their innovation performance using data for 32 European countries. The overall contribution of the paper lies in: (a) an in-depth exploration of empirical correlations between innovation and several indicators of...

The empirical literature investigating the issue of the heterogeneity across firms has proposed the concept of innovation modes. This aims at grouping firms depending on a number of innovation characteristics. The role of design as a source of innovation has been largely disregarded. The aim of...

A central factor which characterizes design-related innovative activities is that a major source of knowledge – that is designers – is very often located outside the firm. This raises a central management issue for the firm and unavoidably generates a tension between designer consultants and...

Composite synthetic indicators of the technological capabilities of nations have been used more frequently over the last years becoming a sort of Olympic medal table of the innovation race. The European Commission, specialised United Nations Agencies, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum,...

Most of the empirical analysis explores the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth within a constitutional void. This paper investigates the connection between fiscal decentralization and income growth across different institutional settings in 20 OECD countries over...

This chapter applies the framework of public goods to knowledge. It shows that knowledge has some characteristics of public good, such as being non-rival in consumption and in the long run non excludable. But it also argues that knowledge cannot be transferred from producers to users at low or...