Abstract:This paper discusses conceptual frameworks for measuring the effects of innovation policy and begins with applying conventional descriptive methods to explore how firms rate and rank the merits of public intervention. Based on survey data from some 1200 Austrian firms we then challenge the hypothetical survey question ("What would you have done if public support was denied?") by comparing the respective answers with changes that actually occurred when public assistance was refused. This is a contribution to the ongoing literature as is the attempt to relate any of the observed additionalities to the firms' characteristics, their perceived barriers to innovation and the degree they make use of the public support system. The effects of policy interventions prove to be cumulative in a dual sense. On the one hand, our results confirm the well-known notion that large firms make the best use of funds. On the other hand, substantial changes in the way a company undertakes R&D&I-related activities appear to only result from multiple policy interventions of different kinds. While supported firms tend to immediately increase their resources devoted to innovation projects, the result-based concepts of additionality only come into effect once a threshold level of intervention has been reached. Acknowledging that a public innovation support system already incentivises potential beneficiaries to change their innovation-related behaviour, and that eventual success in terms of outcomes does not arise from some discrete support measure, but from the synergies of multiple policy action, we conclude that future work should focus more on the evaluation of portfolios of programmes and their interactions. JEL: C25, C42, H50, O31
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Abstract:EU enlargement has increased the diversity of the European Union in a substantial way, in particular with respect to its capacities in the fields of science, technology and innovation (STI). The shares of both gross and business sector expenditures on R&D in GDP are increasingly diverging following EU enlargement pointing at quite different levels of technological opportunities and absorptive capacity. Against this background, this paper tries to disentangles the rationales for STI policies at an EU level. Starting from the different policy rationales we assign different STI policy fields to levels of governance. Our discussion suggests that the European Union plays two quite distinct roles in EU STI policy. The first role is closely related to the assignment of policy competences and establishes the fields where the EU should act as policy maker and program owner. But this alone is likely not enough when it comes to the managing and coordination of complex horizontal policy fields such as STI policy. Here the second role of the European Commission comes into place. This second role is not related to policy making but to the "right" to fuel discussions to find coordinated solutions. This role is essentially political and relates to the job to stimulate activities in areas where the Commission has no mandate (due to missing clear rationales) to act alone.
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