Radical innovation, competition, cooperation and growth.

The main objective of the proposed research is to better understand how radical innovations contribute to firms performance and economic growth. Radical innovations introduce new concepts that depart significantly from past practices, have the potential to generate new markets and through a mix of competitive and cooperative interactions, trigger follow-up innovations and growth in other firms. Apart from a number of insightful qualitative studies, large-scale empirical studies into the origins and effects of radical inventions are almost non-existing. A first step in the project is to clearly characterize radical innovations and subsequently to construct a set of appropriate indicators measuring the characteristics of radical innovations that can be applied in large scale empirical work across firms, technologies, markets, countries and time. We will draw detailed information from the universe of patent and publication data, such as information on companies and inventors involved, content descriptions of patents and publications, backward and forward citations and their pattern. Text- and data-mining algorithms will be developed and applied to detect patterns of (dis-)similarities and complementarities between documents (pairs of citing patents, pairs of patents-publications).These indicators, upon careful validation, will be used to study the origins and effects of radical innovations in more detail. Which scientific and technological know-how and which inventors and firms are at the origin of radical innovations? How do these radical innovations prosper, grow or fail? Which factors hamper these processes? How do radical innovation affect other firms, particularly incumbents? In this part of the analysis we relate the indicators of radical innovation characteristics to company information on economic performance and innovation strategies. Panel data sets will be analyzed with proper econometric techniques. Throughout this process, there will be close interactions with (new) theory modelling. Specific recommendations for government and corporate policy making vis-à-vis radical innovations will be developed from the analysis.

Keywords:Growth, Cooperation, Competition, Innovation, Radical

Disciplines:Business administration and accounting, Management, Applied economics, Economic history, Macroeconomics and monetary economics, Microeconomics, Tourism