New Indicators and Determinants of Innovation: An Introduction

What makes firms innovate? Which factors cause some firms to be more innovative than others? Are Joseph A. Schumpeter’s and John Kenneth Galbraith’s allegations realistic that, in modern capitalism, innovation is mainly a matter of large, oligopolistic firms? Does a firm’s regional environment matter for innovation performance? What about Jacob Schmookler’s (1966) proposition that innovation is a function of effective demand (‘demand-pull’)? What is the contribution of technological networking to innovation performance? Such questions have frequently been raised by industrial economists, but good empirical investigations have remained sparse, mainly due to lack of adequate innovation data (see the surveys by Kamien and Schwartz, 1982, or Baldwin and Scott, 1987).