Innovation Modes and Institutional Context - An exploratory study of seven European national systems of innovation (Paper co-authored with Ina Drejer).

This paper aims at contributing to broadening the understanding of the role of institutions in the functioning of national innovation systems as reflected in the behavior of innovative firms. The theoretical starting point is the literature on national innovation systems with a premise that national institutions (and overall structure of production) matters in explaining the different rates and direction of knowledge accumulation between countries. We explore the role of institutional setting for firms’ innovation behaviour empirically for seven relatively small European countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Portugal and Norway). A range of primarily qualitative data is used for characterizing national institutional settings. Modes of innovation are identified through the use exploratory factor and cluster analysis on a combination of micro and micro-aggregated data from the Community Innovation Survey 2012. We find indications of a relation between institutional setting and modes of innovation for some countries, most notably Denmark, Estonia and only to some extent in Portugal. However, we also find clear indications of institutions not only influencing modes of innovation, but also the level of innovation in a nation as expressed by the proportion of innovative firms – which is the case for Hungary, Lithuania and Bulgaria. This leads us to suggest several empirically based propositions on how institutions contribute to shaping firms’ innovative behavior and to recommend future avenues for research.

About Marija Rakas

Marija Rakas is a PhD Fellow at the IKE (Innovation, Knowledge and Entrepreneurial Dynamics) research group, Aalborg University, Denmark.
She is also member of the Danish Research Unit of Industrial Dynamics (DRUID). The paper is part of her PhD project called “Comparative analysis of the similarities and differences in NIS in contemporary Europe”.
Her current paper address the relationship between the institutional context and different modes of firms’ innovative behaviour.