Rethinking Innovation Comparisons Between Manufacturing and Services: The Experience of the CBR SME Surveys in the UK

Abstract

There has in recent years been an increase in the use of large-scale surveys to measure the nature and extent of innovation activity. The most important development in a European context has been the development within the European Union of a harmonized Community Innovation Survey (CIS) (Archibugi et al, 1995). There have been two such surveys and a third is planned. They aim to cover the whole of the economy including both the manufacturing and service sectors. This commitment to an economy wide sectoral coverage has provided the occasion for a debate about the appropriate way to measure innovation activity in surveys covering both services and manufacturing (OECD, 1992; Evangelista and Sirilli, 1995, 1997; OECD-Eurostat, 1997; Kleinknecht, 1998). This debate is part of a wider literature on the extent to which service activity generally is misrepresented by measurement techniques and theoretical perspectives developed primarily with goods and specifically manufacturing activity in mind (Hill, 1977).

A previous version of this chapter was presented at a workshop entitled “Conceptual ising and Measuring Service Innovation” at the ESRC Centre for Research in Innovation and Competition (CRIC) at the University of Manchester in May 1998. The authors acknowledge the financial support of the ESRC for the research underlying this work.