O31 - Innovation and Invention: Processes and IncentivesReturn

What type of R&D is essential for creating innovations? Is in-house R&D more efficient than purchasing external innovations? The question of various strategies for private firms to succeed in developing innovations is key for ongoing national and international programmes for raising innovativeness of economies. The goal of the paper is to investigate the outcomes of different types of R&D in the context of innovations and to analyse their significance in European countries empirically. In this paper, we aim to provide a quantitative analysis of the problem on the data collected from the Common Innovation Survey. We cover innovations in products, services, production methods, distribution systems and supporting activities. The results suggest that both in-house and external R&D matter for firms' innovativeness, but the effect is stronger for the former for most of the types of innovations considered.

The aim of the article is to present a model of sentiment analysis tool application for planning directions of city development. The study presents a model of using sentiment analysis to build city development strategies as well as realization of projects related to it. The presented model is a part of a larger work on developing the concept of the Regional Spatial Business Community (RSBC). The RSBC is created on the basis of electronic communities built by stakeholders involved in the development of a given city. On the basis of surveys, a six-stage city development procedure is proposed. Using the aforementioned procedure, we describe potential data sources, the goals of sentiment analysis application and expected effects. Analyses of the applicability of sentiment analysis are made on the basis of observation of available tools. The obtained model is applicable; however, its implementation requires certain conditions to be met.

In this article, corruption is treated as an expression of human entrepreneurship, which does not fully fit in the commonly accepted moral and legal standards. Despite being negatively perceived, it is persistently present in the public, economic and political life of every country as evidenced by a number of press releases on corruption.
Research literature analysis reveals the existence of two conflicting opinions with regard to the way in which corruption affects innovative activity of companies and economic growth. The more morally correct theory, which can be dubbed the sand-the-wheels theory, assumes that corruption negatively influences innovative activity and economic growth. Whereas, the grease-the-wheels theory, which is inconsistent with the principles of social responsibility of business, argues for the positive influence of corruption on innovative activity of companies and economic growth. This article is a voice in that discussion.

Arrangements to cooperate on innovation facilitate access to external sources of knowledge. By using panel data derived from the five waves of Community Innovation Survey in the Czech Republic, we examine whether firms engage in these arrangements persistently or rather revert to other behaviour. Econometric estimates of dynamic random effects and multivariate probit models provide strong support to the thesis of persistence, particularly of linkages with the university sector and suppliers. The results are robust to the initial conditions problem and serial correlation in idiosyncratic errors. Government programmes initiating cooperation on innovation therefore have the potential to induce durable changes in the innovative behaviour of firms.

This paper analyses the effect of asymmetry in factor endowments between resourcerich and resource-poor countries on equilibrium bias of technology development and adoption possibilities. First, we show that the bias in equilibrium technology in the resource-poor North is determined by its relative abundance of human capital and physical capital. Secondly, we show that the equilibrium bias in technology in the resource-abundant South is dependent positively (negatively) on the relative abundance (scarcity) of skilled (unskilled) labour and the relative abundance (scarcity) of physical (natural) capital in the North. This force is dampened by the relative scarcity of skilled labour and physical capital in the South. These forces drive wage inequality, high cost of capital and skill technology mismatch in the South, all of which are bad for growth. These effects cumulatively explain part of the observed differences in growth performance between resource-rich and resource-poor countries.

Since Schumpeter, entrepreneurs and innovative activities belong together. Innovativeness as a personality trait is also found to be related to entrepreneurial status and business success. However, not much is known about the specific facets of the entrepreneur's innovative behaviour. This study aims first at better understanding how entrepreneurs differ from managers in the various areas of their innovative behaviour at work. Second, how this behaviour differs for entrepreneurs who have and do not have employees. Representative samples of the working population from Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy and Switzerland (N=3508) were interviewed with the use of the Innovative Behaviour Inventory. Individuals involved in independent entrepreneurial activities create new ideas and attempt to overcome obstacles during implementation more than employed individuals. People who manage other people communicate new ideas and seek to engage other individuals in the implementation of new ideas more than those without subordinates. Finally, what differentiates entrepreneurs from all other groups is their higher involvement in preparatory activities that start the implementation of new ideas. Overall, these differences led to the foremost position of entrepreneurs in achieving the innovation outputs.

The primary aim of the paper is an analysis of the relationships between growth, innovation and subsidies based on a large firm-level data set in the period 2004-2007. The novelty of the approach lies in linking data from financial statements with data from innovation surveys of the Czech Statistical. Innovation activities of firms are modelled as a four stage model (CDM) which allows studying several interrelated questions while controlling for simultaneity and for causality problem. In the first two stages determinants of decision to innovate and consequent innovation investment are separated. In the third stage innovation input (R&D investment) is linked to innovation output, and finally, in the fourth stage it is determined how the productivity of firm is related to its innovation activities. Our analysis proved that innovation input significantly increases innovation output, with increasing firm's size, however, ceteris paribus, the innovation output is decreasing. This means that bigger firms are less efficient in transforming the innovation input into output. More importantly, our analysis shows that access to subsidies has significant, yet negative influence on innovation output. This result may throw a shadow on the efficiency of supported firms and have some implications for competition policy.

This paper demonstrates that increasing returns to scale can be sustained when agents care about praiseworthiness of their conduct. Unlike the desire to attain approbation from external sources, the notion of praiseworthiness seems to have been neglected by contemporary economic literature. Yet the relevance of praiseworthiness as an internal motivational force was stressed by a number of classical economists. We construct an endogenous growth model in which agents derive utility not only from their consumption but also from praiseworthiness of their action. In such a setting, the motivation by praiseworthiness is able to generate positive and accelerating growth of output per labourer in steady state. The main implication of our model is that the existence of increasing returns depends critically on presence of sufficient approbation attributed to creativity. Furthermore, the presence or the absence of these rewards may be susceptible to explain the cross-sectional differences in growth rates, growth miracles and growth disasters.