Innovation on demand—Can public procurement drive market success of innovations?

Public procurement has been at the centre of recent discussions on innovation policy. We embed it into the broader framework of public policies to stimulate innovation: regulations, R&D subsidies and basic research at universities. We synthesize the characteristics of all four instruments conceptionally and quantitatively compare their effects on innovation success for 1100 firms in Germany. We find that public procurement and knowledge spillovers from universities propel innovation success equally. The benefits of university knowledge apply uniformly to all firms. However, public procurement is especially effective for smaller firms in regions under economic stress and in distributive or technological services.     

A time to nourish? Evaluating the impact of public procurement on technological generality through patent data

Innovative public procurement is increasingly considered as a form of public support for private innovation activities by both innovation scholars and policymakers. Economic historians have suggested an even more fundamental role of public procurement in setting the pace of technological change, reporting how defense-related procurement has had a major impact on the emergence and diffusion of many general purpose technologies developed in the United States in the 20th century. In this paper, I suggest that procurement might represent one of the most important elements in creating the right soil to ‘cultivate’ a technology that may have the potential to reach high levels of pervasiveness. To test this hypothesis, I make use of patent data and patent citations. I design a quasi-experiment to compare the changes in the level of generality level over time, between a group of treated and a group of control patents. A patent is assigned to the treatment group if it receives a citation from a patent related to public procurement. Results suggest a positive and significant impact of innovative public procurement on the generality of a patent.     

Design and environmental technologies: Does ‘green-matching’ actually help?

This paper investigates whether a green kind of design helps firms increase their capabilities for inventing in the environmental domain and whether it does so more than ‘standard’ design. It also investigates whether the effect of ‘green-matching’ between new design and technologies is conditional on firms’ innovative capabilities, as reflected by their R&D expenditure. We address these research questions with respect to the world's top R&D investors, looking at their intellectual property rights at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and proposing an original textual identification of green designs and trademarks. We find that green design increases environmental inventions by top R&D investors, and to a greater extent than non-environmental ones. Standard design also stimulates environmental inventions, but to a lesser extent than green design. The ‘green-matching’ actually helps, but internal innovative capabilities are required to make it effective: a green-tech ‘prize’ emerges from green design, but only once a minimum threshold of R&D expenditure has been reached.     

Catching up with the market leader: Does it pay to rapidly imitate its innovations?

In this study we attempt to shed more light on the relationship between speed of new technology imitation and the sales performance of the imitator compared to the innovator, with a particular focus on the performance outcomes resulting from the rapid imitation of technologies introduced by the market leader. Using data on handset technologies mounted on more than 600 devices introduced to the UK market by 14 mobile phone vendors operating from 1997 to 2008, we study hundreds of imitative actions to test hypotheses on the extent to which an imitator can catch up (i.e., reduce the market share gap) with the market leader by rapidly imitating its innovations. First, we show that gaining advantage by rapidly imitating a technology pioneer is contingent on whether the pioneer is the market leader or a non-leader rival. Second, we find that the risks of rapid imitation of the market leader's technologies are mitigated when industry clockspeed is high, i.e., during a period of fast innovation and imitation cycles in an industry, resulting in rapid variations in product design. Third, we observe that the degree of competitive responsiveness of the technology pioneer when its innovations are imitated represents an important mechanism that can explain why speed of imitation may affect how an imitator can improve its market share gains relative to the pioneer. This paper advances competitive dynamics and imitation as predictive theories of how rapid imitators might catch up with market leaders in technology-intensive industries.     

Does the public communication of science influence scientific vocation? Results of a national survey

The purpose of this work was to determine if public communication of science and technology (PCST) has any influence on people's decision to become dedicated to scientific research. For this reason, a national survey involving 852 researchers from all disciplines was conducted in Argentina. The results showed that the factors affecting scientific vocation are many, and that, regardless of differences in gender, age or discipline, the greatest influence on the decision to go into scientific research is exerted by teachers. The analysis also demonstrated that different manifestations of PCST (science books, press articles, audiovisual material, and activities such as visits to science museums) play a significant role in awakening the vocation for science. From these results it may be stated that PCST--in addition to its function of informing and forming citizens--exerts a significant influence in fostering scientific vocation.     

1984: a new push of basic innovations?

With labour market problems pressing national governments to support private innovation, the market mechanism is reinforced as it sets the rate and direction of innovation: (1) in the mix of improvement innovations in established industries, labour-saving technologies are outnumbering the product innovations that offer additional employment and investment opportunities, and (2) basic innovations are rare (stale-mate in technology), but when they occur they tend to occur in ‘clusters’. The competitive nature of allocative decisions on corporate R&D and innovative investment is complemented by the competitive R&D policy of most European countries. As those decisions concern large-scale, highcomplexity technologies, the perspective that the market mechanism tends to produce them in ‘clusters’ poses serious problems of timing, spacing, and — of course — of value judgement about alternative technological developments in the European context. These strategic problems of innovation policy have risen to such a level of potential conflict that they need harmonization.     

On the green and innovative side of trade competitiveness? The impact of environmental policies and innovation on EU exports

This paper aims at exploring how the export competitiveness of the European Union has been affected by environmental regulation and innovation. Starting from the Porter idea that environmental policies may foster international competitiveness by inducing technological innovation. We test both the strong and narrowly strong versions of the Porter hypothesis, in order to understand if such a virtuous cycle is confined into the environmental goods sector (respecting the narrow criterion) or it spreads out through the whole economic system. For this purpose we adopt a theoretically based gravity model applied to the export dynamics of five aggregated manufacturing sectors classified by their technological or environmental content.When testing the strong version, the overall effect of environmental policies does not seem to be harmful for export competitiveness of the manufacturing sector, whereas specific energy tax policies and innovation efforts positively influence export flows dynamics, revealing a Porter-like mechanism. When testing the narrowly strong version, environmental policies, but more incisively environmental innovation efforts, foster green exports. These results show that public policies and private innovation patterns both trigger higher efficiency in the production process through various complementarity mechanisms, thus turning the perception of environmental protection actions as a production cost into a net benefit.     

Intermediation in public procurement of innovation: How Amsterdam’s startup-in-residence programme connects startups to urban challenges

This paper analyses Amsterdam’s Startup-in-Residence (SiR) programme as new type of policy to engage startups in the development of urban innovation through a challenge-based public procurement of innovation (PPI) process. The programme is being mimicked by other cities and government agencies, but so far there has not been a rigorous, theoretically-informed analysis of the approach. In this paper, we specify and focus on the role of city-based, public-affiliated intermediaries as initiators, moderators and influencers of conversations between startups and the local government. The main contribution of SiR as a PPI intermediation programme has been to launch new types of fruitful conversations on several levels, that lead to institutional innovations rather than direct solutions for urban problems or startup development. In this sense, SiR fulfils a role inquiring and ascribing urban challenges with values and notions of “worth” that preceded and shaped innovation directions. We also suggest that engaging startups is effective for only a limited bandwidth urban challenges; different types of intermediation are required to foster collaborative innovation in more complex settings.     

Does history count?

The Census of Marine Life is an international and inter-disciplinary collaboration that seeks to map ocean life of the past, present and future. From the Arctic to the abyssal zones, it is producing a stream of newsworthy science, literally pushing the study of biodiversity to new depths. This fascinating and far-reaching endeavour offers a rich set of insights that can illuminate our changing ideas about the oceans. But one section of the Census deserves special attention--the History of Marine Animal Populations. It provides a unique focus for debates about collaboration and big science, about historical methods and about the study of current science by historians of science.     

Protecting privacy in public? Surveillance technologies and the value of public places

While maintaining the importance of privacy for critical evaluations of surveillance technologies, I suggest that privacy also constrains the debate by framing analyses in terms of the individual. Public space provides a site for considering what is at stake with surveillance technologies besides privacy. After describing two accounts of privacy and one of public space, I argue that surveillance technologies simultaneously add an ambiguityand a specificity to public places that are detrimental to the social, cultural, and civic importance of these places. By making public places accessible to other places and/or times, surveillance technologies make these social contexts ambiguous by blurring their spatial and temporal bounds. At the same time, surveillancetechnologies valence public places in functionally specificways that are detrimental to informal civic life. To complement defensive approaches to surveillance technologies based onindividual privacy, I conclude by suggesting how sociality as a relational value or an ethics of place as a contextual value could provide a proactive line of reasoning for affirming the value ofthat which is between people and places.     

Internal sequential innovations: How does interrelatedness affect patent renewal?

The value of patented innovations has attracted substantial research attention, especially in the context of patent renewal. However, research often assumes that a firm's patented innovations are independent from each other. We draw upon evolutionary economics and suggest that some of a firm's patents share important genealogical relationships, which we refer to as internal sequential innovations. We propose internal sequential innovations are more valuable and therefore more likely to be renewed than stand-alone innovations. We examine our hypotheses from a dataset of US pharmaceutical and biotechnology patents. The results confirm our hypotheses at both the patent and the firm levels.     

Does income redistribution impede innovation?

Economic inequalities have increased in many countries since the 1980s, provoking calls for more income redistribution. One argument against increased redistribution is that it could hamper innovation and technological progress. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that empirically investigates the relationship between government redistributive policies at the top of income distribution and innovative activity using new, high-quality, cross-country comparable panel data on income redistribution from the Distributional National Accounts. This study analyzes data from 34 advanced and emerging countries between 1980 and 2010. We find that redistribution has no negative impact on innovation in the cross-country setting. This result is robust to various measures of income redistribution and patent-based indicators of innovation, including patent counts, patent citations, and patent originality.     

Do public subsidies stimulate private R&D spending?

The objective of this paper is to contribute to the empirical literature that evaluates the effects of public R&D support on private R&D investment. We apply a matching approach to analyze the effects of public R&D support in Spanish manufacturing firms. We examine whether or not the effects are different depending on the size of the firm and the technological level of the sectors in which the firms operate. We evaluate the effect of R&D subsidies on the subsidized firms, considering both the effect of subsidies on firms that would have performed R&D in the absence of public support and also the effect of inducement to undertake R&D activities. We also analyze the effect that concession of subsidies might have on firms which do not enjoy this type of support. The main conclusions indicate absence of “crowding-out”, either full or partial, between public and private spending and that some firms - mainly small and operating in low technology sectors - might not have engaged in R&D activities in the absence of subsidies.     

Does public R&D funding crowd-in private R&D investment? Evidence from military R&D expenditures for US states

Defense R&D represents the largest component of US public R&D spending and historically has promoted a wide range of civilian innovations. However, the empirical evidence on the impact of defense R&D is scant and it does not provide conclusive results on the possible crowding-in (-out) effects on private R&D investment. Exploiting a longitudinal dataset linking public R&D obligations to private R&D expenditures for US states, we investigate the impact of defense R&D on privately-financed R&D. To address potential endogeneity in the allocation of funds, we use an instrumental variable identification strategy leveraging the differential exposure of US states to national shocks in federal military R&D. We document considerable crowding-in effects with elasticities in the 0.11–0.14 range. These positive effects extend also to the labor market, when focusing on employment in selected R&D intensive industries and especially for engineers.     

Does gender matter in computer ethics?

Computer ethics is a relatively young discipline,hence it needs time both for reflection and forexploring alternative ethical standpoints in buildingup its own theoretical framework. Feminist ethics isoffered as one such alternative particularly to informissues of equality and power. We argue that feministethics is not narrowly confined to women's issues but is an approach with wider egalitarianapplications. The rise of feminist ethics in relationto feminist theory in general is described and withinthat the work of Gilligan and others on an ethic of care. We argue for the need to connect theory toempirical evidence. Empirical studies of gender andbusiness and computer ethics are reviewed. We noteconcerns with surveying a student audience, the issueof how far questionnaires and interviews can get tothe heart of ethical beliefs and problems ofperforming statistical analyses of quantitative data.Although we recognize them, our own small surveycannot avoid all these problems. Nevertheless byrefining our scenarios we are able to offer analternative reading of a hacking problem in terms ofan ethic of care thereby pointing a way forward forfuture research in computer ethics inspired byfeminist theory.     

Does fake news affect voting behaviour?

We study the impact of fake news on votes for populist parties in the Italian elections of 2018. Our empirical strategy exploits the historical variation in Italian-speaking and German-speaking voters in the Italian region of Trentino Alto-Adige/Südtirol as an exogenous source of assignment to fake news exposure. Using municipal data, we compare the effect of exposure to fake news on the vote for populist parties in the 2013 and 2018 elections. To do so, we introduce a novel indicator of populism using text mining on the Facebook posts of Italian parties before the elections. Our findings support the view that exposure to fake news favours populist parties regardless of prior support for populist parties, but also that fake news alone cannot explain most of the growth in populism.     

Allocative efficiency in public research funding: Can bibliometrics help?

The use of outcome control modes of research evaluation exercises is ever more frequent. They are conceived as tools to stimulate increased levels of research productivity, and to guide choices in allocating components of government research budgets for publicly funded institutions. There are several contributions in the literature that compare the different methodological approaches that policy makers could adopt for these exercises, however the comparisons are limited to only a few disciplines. This work, examining the case of the whole of the “hard sciences” of the Italian academic system, makes a comparison between results obtained from peer review type of evaluations (as adopted by the Ministry of Universities and Research) and those possible from a bibliometric approach (as developed by the authors). The aim is to understand to what extent bibliometric methodology, which is noted as relatively inexpensive, time-saving and exhaustive, can complement and integrate peer review methodology in research evaluation.     

Does government information release really matter in regulating contagion-evolution of negative emotion during public emergencies? From the perspective of cognitive big data analytics

The breeding and spreading of negative emotion in public emergencies posed severe challenges to social governance. The traditional government information release strategies ignored the negative emotion evolution mechanism. Focusing on the information release policies from the perspectives of the government during public emergency events, by using cognitive big data analytics, our research applies deep learning method into news framing framework construction process, and tries to explore the influencing mechanism of government information release strategy on contagion-evolution of negative emotion. In particular, this paper first uses Word2Vec, cosine word vector similarity calculation and SO-PMI algorithms to build a public emergencies-oriented emotional lexicon; then, it proposes a emotion computing method based on dependency parsing, designs an emotion binary tree and dependency-based emotion calculation rules; and at last, through an experiment, it shows that the emotional lexicon proposed in this paper has a wider coverage and higher accuracy than the existing ones, and it also performs a emotion evolution analysis on an actual public event based on the emotional lexicon, using the emotion computing method proposed. And the empirical results show that the algorithm is feasible and effective. The experimental results showed that this model could effectively conduct fine-grained emotion computing, improve the accuracy and computational efficiency of sentiment classification. The final empirical analysis found that due to such defects as slow speed, non transparent content, poor penitence and weak department coordination, the existing government information release strategies had a significant negative impact on the contagion-evolution of anxiety and disgust emotion, could not regulate negative emotions effectively. These research results will provide theoretical implications and technical supports for the social governance. And it could also help to establish negative emotion management mode, and construct a new pattern of the public opinion guidance.