European Union policymakers have in principle put innovation at the heart of competitiveness, in particular in the Europe 2020 strategy. But in merger control, assessments of the innovation effects of mergers are inadequate, even though mergers and acquisitions can have a significant impact on...

Remedying the European Union's deficient overall business research and development performance requires the nurturing of more new companies in new sectors, enabling them to grow to leading-innovator status. This means addressing young leading innovators' access to external finance, particularly...

Development and deployment of clean-energy technologies is crucial if climate targets are to be met cost-effectively. The European Union already has a plan that deals with these issues: the Strategic Energy Technology Plan, which has become central to the achievement of the EU's ambitions. In a...

Europe's failure to specialise in new ICT sectors and firms is likely to hold back Europe's post-crisis recovery. Europe lacks in particular leading platform providers, who are capturing most of the value in the new ICT ecosystem. In-depth analysis of some specific new emerging ICT sectors shows...

Highlights - Research and development spending has risen rapidly in Asia, particularly in China, which is now the world's second R&D spender behind the United States.The increase in Korean and Chinese patent applications has been even more rapid, but Chinese patenting for exploitation on the...

This paper examines the diversity of the types of links of firms to science and their effect on innovation performance for a sample of Belgian firms. While at the industry level links to science are highly related to the R&D intensity of the sector, we show that there exists considerable...

This paper discusses the diversity of mechanisms which firms can deploy to link to science and how science links are associated with their innovation performance. Using a sample of Flemish firms, we show that there exists considerable heterogeneity in the type of links to science at the firm...

This study investigates the effects of an R&D subsidy scheme on participating firms net R&D investment. Making use of a specific policy design in Belgium that explicitly distinguishes between research and development grants, we estimate direct and cross-scheme effects on research versus...

In this contribution we describe how green policies should be designed to activate private innovation forces for ecological transitions. We look at the evidence on the current deployment of green policies and the current performance of the private green innovation machine. We try to assess how...