The impact of technological regimes on patterns of sustained and sporadic innovation activities in UK industries

This paper brings together ideas about technological regimes and looks at their influence on patterns of sustained or persistent innovation across UK manufacturing and services industries using two waves of the UK Community Innovation Surveys. It builds a link between technological regimes and Schumpeterian patterns of innovation, and tests these on the CIS databases. It creates a model using the variables within the technological regime to see whether these can explain sustained patterns of innovation. These variables include appropriability, cumulativeness, technological opportunity and closeness to the science base as well as enterprise size. The paper finds that strong appropriability, a high degree of cumulativeness, and closeness to the applied science base are strong predictors of sustained innovation activities. The results on technological opportunity are ambiguous. High tech manufacturing industries, i.e. chemicals and scientific instruments as well as some high tech services i.e. telecoms are more likely to register persistent innovation.