Cooperation in innovative activities, organizational innovation and productivitythree essays on economics of innovation

Abstract

Innovation activities performed by .firms and their economic impacts are of central interest to economists and policy-makers. Analysis of these issues requires both knowledge of the factors that affect .firms’s. ability to innovate and knowledge of the impact of innovation activities on .firm performance through changes in both demand and costs. This dissertation studies two of the most relevant research issues on Economics of Innovation: (i) cooperation in innovative activities, and (ii) the relationship between innovation and productivity. In doing this, I use data at the .firm level from the Third Community Innovation Survey (CIS3) and from the Encuesta sobre Estrategias Empresariales (ESEE). The Community Innovation Surveys take place every 4 years in European countries to investigate innovation activities performed by .firms. In 2001, the third wave was conducted and covered the period 1998 to 2000. The ESEE is an unbalanced panel survey of Spanish manufacturing .firms with 10 or more workers, starting in 1990 and sponsored by the Ministry of Industry. A detailed description of these surveys can be found in each chapter. This introduction is organized in three parts. Firstly, I introduce the two issues at stake: cooperation in innovative activities and the relationship between innovation and productivity. I focus on contextualizing both topics in the current development of literature on innovation, as well as on specifying my contributions to this literature. Secondly, I present the structure of the dissertation, summarizing the contents of each chapter. Finally, the last part of this introduction is concerned with the main policy implications of the issues covered by this dissertation.