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Browsing by Subject "innovations"

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  • Citizens’ perceptions on responsible innovations in forest bioeconomy 
    Vihakara, Monika (2019)
    Abstract Strategic development in the forest sector has been slow and not until the 21st century stake-holder focus came as a part of the strategic development. New innovations are now having important role while renewing forest sector into bioeconomy. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)has traditionally been as a target for development in forest sector because of the high usage of natural resources, but from the 1990s it has gained more attention inspired by the global megatrends and now CSR can be seen as the base of the consept of bioeconomy. The study explored the citizen’s perception towards forest sector innovation efforts from the year 2000 and within the next 20 years. The results were drawn from an analysis of two data sets. Data one consisted of multivariate survey data based on 218 valid responses where current state of forest industry innovative-ness was disclosed by using 13 bioeconomy products and services. Data two consisted of qualitative managerial interviews where forest industry professionals’ opinions of forest in-dustry contributions to sustainable innovations through the lens of three-dimensional innova-tion model/pyramid. Additionally, the aim was to get some reflections from survey results. Concluding the results of this study, the public opinion of forest sector innovations seemed to focus on constructions related innovation efforts and biofuels. In addition, results showed that perceptions of material substitution with wood and reducing environmental impacts of industry were improved since year 2000. The image of future innovation targets of forest sector was quite wide and most heavily it was pointed towards wood building systems, con-struction materials, brand development and material substitution with wood. Statistically sig-nificant differences found between the “past” and “future” innovativeness inquire strengthen-ing of both industry R & D and functioning of innovation systems.
  • Do Public R&D Subsidies Foster Innovation? : Evidence from Finnish Patent Data 
    Louhivuori, Valtter (2013)
    Innovations can be seen as an engine of long-term economic growth. Firms conduct research and development (R&D) activities to create new production technology, methods or products in order to rival their competitors. In addition to benefiting the inventor, new innovations have considerable positive externalities through knowledge spillovers. However, the socially optimal level of innovations may not be achieved, because firms can underinvest in R&D if they are not compensated for the positive externalities produced by their R&D activities. Public R&D programs aim to encourage innovation by compensating firms for the positive externalities that they produce. Finland’s recent public efforts on fostering innovation have been globally high by many indicators. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of these efforts has been relatively little scrutinised. This thesis studies the effectiveness of Finnish R&D program in fostering innovation outputs at the firm level. Firm-level patent statistics are used as a proxy for the innovativeness of a firm. A major contribution of this thesis is the comprehensive database that has been constructed and employed for the analysis. The database includes firm-level innovative characteristics for all the Finnish firms during a ten-year sample period, altogether covering more than two million observations for over 400 000 firms. Most of the studies on the effectiveness of the Finnish R&D program rely on the assumption that the researcher has full information on the relevant innovative characteristics that affect a firm’s program eligibility. This thesis addresses the program selectivity concern by employing an instrumental variable approach that exploits regional variation in public R&D funding stemming from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) aid regulations. The estimates suggest that when the program selection bias is neglected, program participation is associated with around 10 percentage point increase in patenting probability among active patentees, whereas for all firms, the increase in patenting probability is only around 0.1 percentage points. However, the instrumental variable estimates do not confirm any significant causal effect of R&D program on patenting. This thesis highlights the importance of accounting for the selection bias induced by the R&D program selection criteria. The public R&D agency is found to select firms strongly based on the same characteristics that are highly associated with innovation within firms. Therefore, it is important to ask if some of the supported firms might have had conducted their R&D projects even in the absence of the public support. Analysing the R&D program’s selection criteria plays a major role in scrutinising the effectiveness of public R&D subsidies and in the further development of public innovation policies.

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