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Innovation in Firms: A Microeconomic Perspective
OECD Publishing, Dec 2009, Pages: 224
Innovation matters for growth. Improving our knowledge of firms’ innovative behaviour and its determinants is crucial for designing effective innovation policies. Data collected through innovation surveys have been increasingly used to explore a number of questions regarding the determinants, the effects and some of the characteristics of innovation. Nonetheless, with few exceptions, almost all such studies have been conducted at the level of individual countries. While valuable, they do not allow for comparing results across countries. Reasons for not exploiting firm-level data at the international level are mainly legal: access to innovation survey data, as for microdata in general, is restricted by laws that protect confidentiality and secrecy in all countries. As a consequence, microdata from different countries cannot be pooled and because different models and methodologies are used, the results are usually not comparable across countries.
This is why the OECD launched the Innovation Microdata Project in 2006 based on a “decentralised” approach combining a common framework provided by the OECD with the work undertaken by researchers with access to their own country’s microdata. It is a pragmatic way to address problems of data access and still provide better information to the policy community. More needs to be done to refine and expand on these results. Innovation surveys can be exploited further, but more promising analysis can be carried out by matching innovation survey data with other firm-level data and administrative records, such as balance sheets, R&D surveys, ICT surveys, surveys of organisational practices, patent records, public support, etc. This would make possible different (and better) measures of productivity and would help to learn more about which policies work and which do not, and to better understand the reasons why similar policies may be more effective in certain countries than in others, all questions that the exploitation of aggregate data can only begin to address.
This volume highlights the findings and challenges of this large-scale endeavour, draws some lessons and identifies some areas for future research. This project was a first experiment and relied considerably on the willingness of researchers to invest a considerable amount of personal time. Without their help and dedication this collaborative effort would not have been possible. It is hoped that this exercise and exchange will have benefited them as well, and that the network of people and the exchange of ideas will continue to flow to the benefit of a better understanding of the links between innovation and economic performance and the role played by policies.
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