Alessandra Scandura

Achieving net-zero emissions alongside sustained economic growth necessitates unprecedented innovation efforts. Demand is a pivotal driver. This paper presents novel evidence concerning the relationship between public procurement for green products and services (GPP) and firm innovation. GPP widens market niches for new green goods and accelerates the adaptation of conventional goods to meet more rigorous environmental standards. This, in turn, fosters the creative response of the firm, stimulating innovation in both new green products and new green processes. The empirical analysis focuses on US publicly listed innovative companies from 2004 to 2016. The results demonstrate that increases in GPP stimulate green innovation overall, particularly process-related. Moreover, we observe that this is more pronounced in larger and older firms, as well as in those endowed with substantial knowledge and organizational capital. These results provide valuable insights for designing effective policy frameworks to expedite the green transition while ensuring economic growth.

The simultaneous pursuit of circular economy and bioeconomy objectives is crucial for a successful transition towards a more sustainable economic system, as also recognised by European institutions. However, mapping and analysing European research and innovation capacity in circular bioeconomy (CBE) is a challenging task, also due to data shortage. The analysis presented in this chapter aims to map the CBE research and innovation networks in Europe and identify their strengths and weaknesses. We apply network analysis techniques to a sample of collaborative research projects carried out in European regions in the period 2015-2019 and to patent data. The role and position of regions in the networks are assessed using a “node-removal strategy”, while a taxonomy of regional capabilities is developed based on comparisons of regional centrality in research and patent-technology networks. We find evidence of high connectivity in these domains, in the sense of intense collaboration across EU regions. Nonetheless, the analysis also shows that there is a significant heterogeneity in the distribution, capacity, and intensity of the connections, as well as a high concentration around few and very central regions. These findings can be precious for policymakers and other stakeholders who care about reducing the EU research and innovation disparities.

This paper answers calls for a better understanding of the importance of domestic collaboration networks for innovation in immigrant- and native-owned firms. With a specific focus on the domestic networks established with other firms, research institutions, and business associations, we question whether cultivating such social capital with diverse actors is linked to better innovation performances for immigrant-owned firms. We investigate this research question by exploiting a unique matched-pair sample of immigrant and native domestic entrepreneurs who are active in high-tech mainstream (non-ethnic) markets. Our results show that universities and research institutions, along with business associations, are more important for innovation in immigrant-owned firms. In addition, we discover that immigrant entrepreneurs' acculturation to the host country's culture acts as a substitute for interactions with business associations. These findings contribute to the academic and policy knowledge on the link between immigrant entrepreneurship and innovation in developed countries.

We study the entry of regions in new green technological specializations, specifically investigating the role of recombinant novelty and academic inventors and the interplay between the two. We conduct an empirical analysis on a panel of Italian NUTS-3 regions observed from 1999 to 2009. The results show that both recombinant novelty and the presence of academic inventors are positively associated with new entries in green technological specializations, and that their interaction provides a compensatory mechanism in regions lacking adequate novel combinatorial capabilities. The findings of this study are relevant for policymakers involved in the elaboration of successful regional specialization strategies in green technological domains.

This work explores the role of university department characteristics in academic engagement with industry. In particular, we investigate the role played by research quality and previous experience in academic engagement across different scientific disciplines. We test our hypotheses on a dataset of public sponsored university-industry partnerships in the United Kingdom, combined with data from the UK Research Assessment Exercises 2001 and 2008. Our analysis reveals a negative link between academic quality and the level of engagement with industry for departments in the basic sciences and a positive relationship for departments in the applied sciences. Our results further show that the role of research quality for academic engagement strictly depends on the level of the department’s previous experience in university-industry partnerships, notably in the basic sciences, where experience acts as a moderating factor. The findings of this work are highly relevant for policy makers and university managers and contribute to the innovation literature focused on the investigation of the determinants of valuable knowledge transfer practices in academia.