Universities look beyond the patent policy discourse in their intellectual property strategies

This paper contributes the analysis of the persistence of innovation activities, as measured by different innovation indicators and explores its path dependent characteristics. The empirical analysis of firm level innovative activities for a sample of 451 Italian manufacturing companies observed during the years 1998-2006 confirms the presence of significant persistence in innovation. However, the levels of persistence as captured by the inter-temporal elasticity between the innovation indicators show significant variations according to the typology of innovation considered. The higher level of persistence is found for R&D investments, witnessing the actual presence of significant entry and exit barriers. Furthermore, we obtain a relatively higher persistence for product innovation than process innovation.