As enterprises expand and post increasing information about their business activities on their websites, website data promises to be a valuable source for investigating innovation. This article examines the practicalities and effectiveness of web mining as a research method for innovation studies. We use web mining to explore the R&D activities of 296 UK-based green goods small and mid-size enterprises. We find that website data offers additional insights when compared with other traditional unobtrusive research methods, such as patent and publication analysis. We examine the strengths and limitations of enterprise innovation web mining in terms of a wide range of data quality dimensions, including accuracy, completeness, currency, quantity, flexibility and accessibility. We observe that far more companies in our sample report undertaking R&D activities on their web sites than would be suggested by looking only at conventional data sources. While traditional methods offer information about the early phases of R&D and invention through publications and patents, web mining offers insights that are more downstream in the innovation process. Handling website data is not as easy as alternative data sources, and care needs to be taken in executing search strategies. Website information is also self-reported and companies may vary in their motivations for posting (or not posting) information about their activities on websites. Nonetheless, we find that web mining is a significant and useful complement to current methods, as well as offering novel insights not easily obtained from other unobtrusive sources.

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We investigate the relationships between the citation impacts of scientific papers and the sources of funding that are acknowledged as having supported those publications. We examine several relationships potentially associated with funding, including first citation, total citations, and the chances of becoming highly cited. Furthermore, we explore the links between citations and types of funding by organization and also with combined measures of funding. In particular, we examine the relationship between funding intensity and funding variety and citation. Our empirical work focuses on six small advanced European economies, applying a zero inflated negative binomial model to a set of more than 240,000 papers authored by researchers from these countries. We find that funding is not related to the first citation but is significantly related to the number of citations and top percentile citation impact. Additionally, we find that citation impact is positively related to funding variety and negatively related with funding intensity. Finally there is an inverse relationship between the relative frequency of funding and citation impact. The results presented in the paper provide insights for the design of research programs and the structure of research funding and for the behavior and strategies of research and sponsoring organizations.

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Absorbing infrared radiation efficiently is important for critical applications such as thermal imaging and infrared spectroscopy. Common infrared absorbing materials are not standard in Si VLSI technology. We demonstrate ultra-broadband mid-infrared absorbers based purely on silicon. Broadband absorption is achieved by the combined effects of free carrier absorption, and vibrational and plasmonic absorption resonances. The absorbers, consisting of periodically arranged silicon gratings, can be fabricated using standard optical lithography and deep reactive ion etching techniques, allowing for cost-effective and wafer-scale fabrication of micro-structures. Absorption wavebands in excess of 15 micrometers (5–20 μm) are demonstrated with more than 90% average absorptivity. The structures also exhibit broadband absorption performance even at large angles of incidence (θ = 50°), and independent of polarization.

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1.1 AIM OF THIS HANDBOOK 'Wouldn't it be good if we knew what works in innovation policy, to inform future policy making and be more efficient and effective in designing future innovation policy instruments as a result?' This earnest request was made recently by a senior UK politician. Yet, in the last 20 years, hundreds of evaluations and academic studies have been conducted on a wide variety of interventions that, by various means, have an impact on innovation input, output, processes, practices and capabilities. So why is there still uncertainty about this area and what does this new volume add to our understanding of the impacts of innovation policy? Previous studies have mainly focused on specific policies, programmes and projects-to assess their past performance and, in some cases, to improve their future design and implementation. The editors and authors of this book have themselves performed numerous evaluations, and have also tried to learn from existing evaluation evidence. Over the years, however, we have realised that, in the policy making community, learning from existing evidence has its limits. It can often be introspective, drawing lessons from one's own activities and evaluations or from a limited number of narratives labelled as 'best cases'. Less common in the academic and policy making communities are systematic attempts to take advantage of the numerous existing evaluations of innovation policy instruments. Furthermore, academic studies tend to highlight the specific contribution that their method or data makes, rather than producing systematic comparisons or syntheses of the effects of policy instruments. For these reasons the idea of a structured effort to learn from the extensive array of evidence on innovation policy impact both fills a gap and offers promising opportunities for new insights. Supported by Nesta, 1 an international team of innovation policy experts, led by the editors of this book, turned our politician's request into something tangible. Between 2011 and 2013, we conducted a study to gather and synthesise the most relevant and recent evidence on the impact of innovation policy measures. The study was titled the Compendium of Evidence on the Effectiveness of Innovation Policy. 2 This Handbook presents the result of that study. In line with practice in the international evaluation and academic literature, in this Handbook we use the terms policy 'instrument', 'intervention' and 'measure' interchangeably.

This paper explores enterprise development and commercialization in the field of graphene. Firm characteristics and relationships, value chain positioning, and factors associated with product entry are examined for a set of 65 graphene-oriented small and medium-sized enterprises located in 16 different countries. As well as secondary sources and bibliometric methods to profile developments in graphene, we use computerized data mining and analytical techniques, including cluster and regression modeling, to identify patterns from publicly available online information on enterprise web sites. We identify groups of graphene small and medium-sized enterprises differentiated by how they are involved with graphene, the materials they target, whether they make equipment, and their orientation toward science and intellectual property. In general, access to finance and the firms’ location are significant factors that are associated with graphene product introductions. We also find that patents and scientific publications are not statistically significant predictors of product development in our sample of graphene enterprises. We further identify a cohort of graphene-oriented firms that are signaling plans to develop intermediate graphene products that should have higher value in the marketplace. Our findings suggest that policy needs to ensure attention to the introduction and scale-up of downstream intermediate and final graphene products and associated financial, intermediary, and market identification support. The paper demonstrates novel data methods that can be combined with existing information for real-time intelligence to understand and map enterprise development and commercialization in a rapidly emerging and growing new technology.