The Open Innovation (OI) concept has pervaded the academic and policy debate due to its potential to further stimulate the circulation of knowledge between business partners and institutions and, consequently, to increase their innovation potential. This paper studies the relationships between OI and innovation and economic returns at the ‘aggregate’ level, i.e. at the country and industry levels. It exploits three waves of the Community Innovation Survey to conduct an empirical analysis on sectoral data for 16 EU countries.

The Open Innovation concept has pervaded the academic and policy debate, due to its potential to further stimulate the circulation of knowledge across business partners and institutions and, consequently, to increase their innovation potential. The contribution of this paper is to unveil the economic returns associated to such a model, to answer the main question whether the productivity growth slowdown observed in the EU in recent years could be overcome through a more open and dynamic innovation environment.

This paper explores the possible job creation effect of innovation activity. We analyze a unique panel dataset covering almost 20,000 patenting firms from Europe over the period 2003-2012. The main outcome from the proposed GMM-SYS estimations is the labour-friendly nature of innovation, which we measure in terms of forward-citation weighted patents. However, this positive impact of innovation is statistically significant only for firms in the high-tech manufacturing sectors, while not significant in low-tech manufacturing and services.

The paper assesses the impact of European Union (EU) grants for research and innovation on profit-oriented firms’ productivity. Using a unique dataset on both successful and unsuccessful applicants to the EU’s 7th Framework Programme and balance-sheet data for firms from 46 countries, we show that the EU grants have had a positive impact on firms’ post-treatment productivity.

High-growth, innovative enterprises are a key source of business dynamics, but little is known about their actual share in the enterprise population. This is due to an inherent uncertainty in how to define the threshold that distinguishes high-growth firms from non-high-growth firms – illustrated by the lack of agreement between the definitions applied by Eurostat and the OECD. This explorative study aims to help measure the share of high-growth, innovative enterprises in the European enterprise population, test how the choice of definition affects their share.

Companies devise strategies to successfully navigate the treacherous waters of an uncertain business environment. They need to tackle regulatory or market obstacles in order to succeed and eventually achieve strong growth performance. This study aims to better understand the complex relationship between strategies, obstacles and firm performance.