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R&D, Innovation and Productivity

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Abstract

This chapter reviews various technological indicators from innovation inputs to innovation outputs, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses and the consequent caution that is in order when using these data for economic analysis. It briefly explains the theoretical link between innovation and productivity growth and then compares the estimated magnitudes of that relationship using the different innovation indicators.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a more extended discussion on innovation indicators, see Kleinknecht (2002), Hagedoorn and Cloodt (2003), Gault (2010, 2013), and Hall and Jaffe (2018).

  2. 2.

    Since 2009 in the United States, the Business R&D and Innovation Survey, conducted jointly by the National Science Foundation/Science Resources Statistics (NSF/SRS) and the US Census Bureau, replaces the Survey of Industrial Research and Development by adding to the R&D survey some questions related to innovation. It is more an R&D survey than an innovation survey.

  3. 3.

    The German Mannheim Innovation Panel is managed by the ZEW-Leibniz Center for European Economic Research.

  4. 4.

    The Spanish ESSE (Encuesta sobre Estrategias Empresariales) Survey on Business Strategies has been conducted since 1990 by the Ministry of Industry and the SEPI Foundation.

  5. 5.

    Recent work on team capital confirms this loss of tacit knowledge. Azoulay et al. (2010) find that the premature death of a superstar scientist reduces by 5–8% the quality-adjusted publication record of his (her) collaborators. In the same vein, Jaravel et al. (2018) find that the unexpected death of an inventor decreases the co-inventors’ earnings by 4% and their citation-weighted patents by 15% after 8 years.

  6. 6.

    Patent data have been used for other topics than their link to R&D and productivity, like the strategic use of patents (pre-emptive patenting, patent trolls, patent litigations, patent thickets), or policies for protecting intellectual property (patent length, patent breath, patentability); see Hall and Harhoff (2012). We shall limit ourselves to the use of patents as indicators of innovation and their link to variations in productivity.

  7. 7.

    Sjöö (2016) examines whether there was an industrial renewal in Sweden between 1970 and 2007 in terms of degree of novelty, volume, firm size, concentration and industrial origin on the basis of some 4000 innovations introduced in Sweden during this time period. She does not relate innovations to productivity growth.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was written under EU-funded project GROWINPRO, GA 822781. Part of this paper was written while I was visiting Renmin University of China, which I would like to thank for its hospitality. This chapter is not meant to be an exhaustive survey of the literature. Scholars should not feel offended if some of their work on these topics is not mentioned. References serve mainly to illustrate certain points. I thank Thijs ten Raa for encouraging me to write this paper. I am grateful to a referee for his/her constructive comments on a first version of this paper.

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    Pierre Mohnen

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    Thijs ten Raa

  2. Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    William H. Greene

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Mohnen, P. (2019). R&D, Innovation and Productivity. In: ten Raa, T., Greene, W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Economic Performance Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23727-1_4

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