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Factors of Entry and Persistence In Innovation: A Competence Based Approach

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The Economics of Persistent Innovation: An Evolutionary View

Part of the book series: Economics of Science, Technology and Innovation ((ESTI,volume 31))

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Abstract

Results about persistence reported in this book lead to two main conclusions: firstly most of the patenting firms only patent for one year, afterwards they never or very sporadically patent; secondly, a few firms succeed in continuing to patent for long periods of time. Unfortunately patent data are not sufficient to understand in detail why some firms persist in innovation while others are absolutely non-innovative or only sporadic innovators. The purpose of this paper is to explore this question with qualitative data collected in two French surveys devoted to study innovation and the competences for innovation. More precisely we will address three questions: 1- What are the competences that explain entry into innovation? 2- What are the competences that explain persistence in innovation? 3- What are the differences between competences that promote entry and those that promote persistence? This chapter is structured into three parts. Firstly we briefly discuss the relevance of this questioning and we describe the organization of our empirical analysis. Secondly we present the French surveys on which the analysis is based and we report basic descriptive results. Thirdly we comment on the results obtained from different binary logit estimations in which competences are entered as explanatory variables of the probability of entry and persistence in innovation. In conclusion we discuss the scope and implications of the results.

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Cabagnols, A. (2006). Factors of Entry and Persistence In Innovation: A Competence Based Approach. In: Latham, W.R., Le Bas, C. (eds) The Economics of Persistent Innovation: An Evolutionary View. Economics of Science, Technology and Innovation, vol 31. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-29245-8_3

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