Innovation

Firm Ownership and Innovation Behaviors

Lilei Xu – Harvard University; Yao Zeng – Harvard University

This project compares innovative activities of public firms with observably similar private firms to investigate whether public and private firms innovate differently. The research estimates the causal impact of ownership structures on firms’ R&D behaviors, the novelty of innovation, the sources of R&D funding, and whether firms conduct in-house R&D or acquire external technologies. The project also evaluates the quality of Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) data for responses to new measures for worldwide operations such as worldwide net sales and revenues, total worldwide costs, worldwide R&D expenses and compensations, worldwide R&D agreements, worldwide R&D employees, scientists and engineers, as well as worldwide R&D performed by others. The analysis compares the measures and reports of firms’ worldwide operations to their counterparts in Compustat, as reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Impact of R&D Practices on R&D Effectiveness

Anne Marie Knott – Washington University in Saint Louis; Carl Vieregger – University of Illinois

This project will empirically test a number of theories regarding firm characteristics and firm behavior (incentives to innovate), as well as firm characteristics and economic outcomes (the effectiveness of innovation). It will construct a new measure of R&D effectiveness, called RQ, which will allow one to test economic performance hypotheses for any firm with R&D activity (rather than just firms with patents), covering a broad swath of industries in the U.S. economy. This research will provide important advancements in the research of R&D determinants and outcomes, providing new estimates to the Census Bureau.

Organizations in the Digital Economy: Information Technology Use, Complementary Investments, and Impacts On Firm Outcomes

Patricia Angle – Georgia Institute of Technology; Wang Jin – Clark University; Mercedes Delgado – Temple University; Kristina McElheran – Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Christopher Forman – Georgia Institute of Technology; Naomi Hausman – Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Oren Ziv – Harvard University

This research investigates recent IT adoption and considers complementary organizational investments. It examines different margins of IT use and investigates both traditional and non-traditional firm outcomes from IT and complementary investments, including productivity, entry, innovation, operational responsiveness, and organizational structure.

Innovation in the Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey

Juana Sanchez – University of California, Los Angeles

With the changes in the nature and concept of innovation that the present economic scenario entails, analysis and modeling of the economics of innovation done in the past need reevaluating. Microdata analysis provides the opportunity to address the relevant issues surrounding innovation with a new metric for innovation, and to learn more about the issue about which we know less: organization of research collaboration strategies among companies and their ability to utilize results of externally performed research. This will shed new light on the variability in innovation across firms. This research will (1) characterize innovation modes of companies in the U.S. and their missing data patterns, (2) model econometrically the relative contribution of organization and collaboration to the industrial differences in innovation rates under alternative scenarios, and (3) study the sensitivity of population estimates to different missing data adjustments and weighting methods.