Category: Riset

We study private sector investments in innovation in the early days of the financial crisis (between mid 2008 and mid 2009), using a survey covering more than 5,000 firms across 21 European countries. Our interest is in how the stock of skilled labour affects the persistence of investment in innovation during a macroeconomic downturn. We infer differences in skill from national levels of participation in vocational education and training (VET) programmes interacted with levels of employment protection (EP) and unemployment insurance (RR). These forms of insurance should lead VET students to undertake training for skills which are more risky as human capital investments, but potentially more productive. We show that the strongest sustained investment in innovation is associated with a combination of high VET with either strong EP or strong RR. The result supports the view that the supply of skills makes an important contribution to innovation, and that social insurance can encourage socially beneficial risk-taking in educational choices.

This paper aims to explain the divergence in technological strategies among leading electric vehicle (EV) firms in China. EVs, with their prospect of energy efficiency and emission reduction, have attracted widespread attention in recent years. However, EV development still faces technological challenges. While these challenges are similar for all firms, their coping strategies are highly divergent. One of the main reasons is that the policy environment for Chinese EV developers is shaped by a multiplicity of institutional logics which are sometimes incoherent. This allows firms to selectively build on those institutional logics that meet their needs and priorities. This strategic behavior results in divergent technological paths.

This study uses patent analyses to compare the knowledge bases of leading wind turbine firms in Asia and Europe. It concentrates on the following three aspects: the trajectories of key technologies, external knowledge networks, and the globalisation of knowledge application. Our analyses suggest that the knowledge bases differ significantly between leading wind turbine firms in Europe and Asia. Europe’s leading firms have broader and deeper knowledge bases than their Asian counterparts. In contrast, the leading Chinese firms, with their unidirectional knowledge networks, are highly domestic in orientation with respect to the application of new knowledge. However, Suzlon, the leading Indian firm, has a better knowledge position. While our quantitative analysis validates prior qualitative studies it also brings new insights. The study suggests that European firms are still leaders in this industry, and leading Asian firms are unlikely to create new pathways that will disrupt the incumbents in the near future.

Globally, new forms of electromobility are challenging established transport technologies based on internal combustion engines. We explore how this transition is simultaneously unfolding in four countries, enabling us to shed some light on the dynamics and determinants of technological path creation. Our analysis covers two old industrialized countries (France and Germany) and two newly industrialized countries (China and India) with very different market conditions and policy frameworks. It reveals enormously different choices of technologies and business models and traces them back to four main drivers of divergence: technological capabilities, demand conditions, political priorities and economic governance.

This paper asks what insights the literature provides on divergence versus convergence of innovation paths in Europe and Asia. It contrasts the abundant literature on determinants of innovation paths with the scarcity of studies that are explicitly comparative across countries or continents. Implicit conclusions however emerge from several lines of work including evolutionary perspectives which stress differences in national conditions, and other perspectives which stress latecomer and globalisation effects. This paper distils and draws together the main conclusions on why innovation paths can be expected to diverge or converge. Its contribution lies in spelling out and bringing together implicit and explicit insights from a wide range of literatures. It also provides an analytical backdrop for some of the other papers in this special issue of Science and Public Policy which provide comparative empirical analyses of low carbon innovation paths.