Customer - Driven Innovation in the Electrical, Optical and ICT Industry

Before being adopted internationally, successful innovation designs tend to have been preferred in one particular country or region. These countries or regions can subsequently be labelled as Lead Markets. This paper employs a Lead Market approach to assess for each of the 25 European Union member states (EU-25) its likelihood that locally preferred innovation designs in the Electrical/Optical/ICT Industry become successful in other countries. A system of five particular demand- and country-specific attributes - the so called Lead Market factors – is regarded as critical for the probability of the market becoming a Lead Market: price advantage, demand advantage, export advantage, transfer advantage and market structure advantage. The aim of this paper is to identify and operationalise indicators to measure and compare the Lead Market properties at international level. The indicators used are taken from the Community Innovation Surveys (CIS-3 and CIS-4), the Eurostat/OECD PPP and Expenditure Database at BH level, the UNCTAD FDI-Database, the EU Business Demography Statistics, and the Eurostat Foreign Trade Database (Comext). Based on the Lead Market analysis, implications for policy makers are outlined.