Abstract
The potential role of vocational education and training (VET) for innovation is the subject of a growing number of studies. Quantitative evidence for this relationship, however, remains scarce. Therefore, this paper uses representative German company data to examine the relationship between a firm’s initial VET activity and its innovation output. The results based on linear probability models and entropy balancing indicate that the direct link between initial VET and firm-level innovation is more ambiguous than often postulated. For the total population of German companies, a positive correlation with initial VET is only found for incremental product and process innovations. Furthermore, a significant link between initial VET and innovation is only found in the group of microenterprises with less than 10 employees. From this, we conclude that participation in the VET system primarily promotes the innovative capacity of very small training companies through the diffusion of new technologies and knowledge. The paper concludes with implications for policy and research.
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Data Availability
The 2017 wave of the IAB Establishment Panel dataset, which is analyzed during the current study, is available at the Research Data Centre (FDZ) of the German Federal Employment Agency (BA) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). Data access is available via remote data execution. See https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5164/IAB.IABBP9317.de.en.v1.
Code Availability
The Stata do-files used for the empirical analysis are available in the Mendeley repository, V2, doi https://doi.org/10.17632/cgk5npmks2.2. See https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/cgk5npmks2/2
Notes
The questions asked in the IAB survey 2017 were “In the last business year of 2016, did your establishment improve or further develop a product or service which had previously been part of your portfolio?” (product innovation); “In the last business year of 2016, did your establishment start to offer a product/service that had been available on the market before?” (incremental product innovation); “Have you started to offer a completely new product or service in the last business year of 2016 for which a new market had to be created?” (radical product innovation); and “Did you develop or implement procedures in the last business year of 2016 which have noticeably improved production processes or services?” (process innovation).
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Matthies, E., Haverkamp, K., Thomä, J. et al. Does Initial Vocational Training Foster Innovativeness at the Company Level? Evidence from German Establishment Data. J Knowl Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-024-01756-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-024-01756-9