Economics of Innovation and New Technology

Call for papers – special issue:

Innovation Persistence

Pdf file available here

Innovation persistence is emerging as a critical area of interest: a fertile field of theoretical analysis and empirical investigation. So far the literature has shed attention upon three main mechanisms that allow firms to maintain high innovation rates over time: i) the presence of a virtuous loop linking firm technological success, better economic performance and consequently larger amounts of available resources to be invested in R&D activities; ii) technological learning; iii) knowledge spillovers and externalities in the localized context of action. Recent contributions have highlighted how the correct identification of the types of non-ergodic processes through which firms innovate continuously is a nontrivial task. Moreover results can be highly sensitive to the innovation indicators adopted (patent filings, survey data, productivity data, etc.). The availability of new firm-level data sets (stemming mainly from the Community Innovation Survey) on the innovation process provides the opportunity to address a number of important open issues related to the characteristics of the dynamic processes and the factors shaping the persistence of innovative behavior at the firm level. Their assessment has important implications for the understanding of the long-term dynamics of firms, industries and economic systems and hence for innovation policies and technology and corporate strategy.

Below we list some of the research topics that deserve further analyses:

1. The analysis of the relationship between innovation persistence and firm economic performance.
2. The assessment of the relevance of different potential determinants of innovation persistence (e.g. R&D sunk costs; increasing R&D returns; internal learning processes).
3. The empirical assessment of the impact of organizational change on innovation persistence.
4. The study of the different persistence patterns of complex (i.e. process and product) innovators and simple (only process or only product) innovators.
5. The development of cross-country and cross-industry comparisons of innovation persistence patterns.
6. The roles of regions and geography in shaping firm-level innovation persistence.
7. The improvement of our understanding of the characteristics of “sporadic innovators”.
8. The role of persistent inventors, i.e. individual researchers.
9. The relationship between innovation persistence and structural change in economic history.
10. The specification of the non-ergodic processes at work, whether past or path dependent.

This special issue will be edited by Christian Le Bas (GATE, University of Lyon) and Giuseppe Scellato (DISPEA - Politecnico di Torino).

GUIDELINES FOR CONTRIBUTORS

This call is open and competitive, and the submitted papers will be reviewed in the normal way. Submitted papers must be based on original material not under consideration by any other journal. To be considered for publication, manuscripts of a maximum of 8000 words (inclusive of all references, notes and appendices), with clear indication of corresponding author’s contact details, must be sent electronically (in .doc, or .docx,) to Christian.Lebas@univ-lyon2.fr and giuseppe.scellato@polito.it .

Important dates

Submission deadline for full papers: April 30th 2012

For the papers selected by the guest editors:

1st referee report due by: September, 30th 2012

Workshop for the presentation of selected papers in Turin (Italy): February 2013

Final submission deadline: 1st June 2013

Expected publication: Fall 2013