Modes of ICT Innovation: Evidence from the Community Innovation Survey

This report was prepared in the context of the three-year research project on European Innovation Policies for the Digital Shift (EURIPIDIS). This project was jointly launched in 2013 by JRC-IPTS and DG CONNECT of the European Commission. It aims to improve understanding of innovation in the ICT sector and ICT-enabled innovation in the rest of the economy. In the context of the EURIPIDIS project, this report analyses innovative activities by ICT-producing firms and provides evidence on innovative activity in the ICT sector, compared to the overall economy. This analysis, based on a set of different indicators, aims to provide a deeper understanding of the modes of innovation adopted by ICT producing firms. To carry out the analysis, we created a panel dataset which matched the information collected by different Community Innovation Survey (CIS) waves from 2004 up to 2012 in twenty EU Member States. We then investigated the major innovation patterns that emerged, and compared the ICT sector to the whole economy. The main findings show that, in general, firms in the ICT sector tend to innovate more with respect to the economy as a whole: the shares of both innovators and technological innovators are consistently higher within the ICT sector than they are in the economy as a whole. Moreover, the ICT sector has a higher share of innovative firms which perform R&D and a higher share of Framework Programme-funded innovative firms. In order to capture the modes of innovation of ICT-producing firms, we used "complex" indicators that condense information from more than one measure and allow us to make multi-dimensional phenomena uni-dimensional. These complex indicators indicate that the share of international and domestic innovators is higher among ICT firms than it is in the economy as a whole. In other words, ICT firms tend to have a higher than average in-house R&D capability and are more likely to introduce new-to-the-market product or process innovations in both international and domestic markets. Looking at international or domestic "modifiers" (i.e. firms that mainly adopt and/or modify innovation made by others), we find no evidence that ICT-producing firms are more likely than the average firm to modify or adopt innovations developed elsewhere.