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In May 2018, a new regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), on data protection came in the European Union into force. It requires firms to update their data protection strategy and may complicate the use of data related to individuals, with potentially adverse effects on product innovation. This study provides evidence on the likely impacts of the GDPR on innovation. We employ a conditional difference-in-differences research design and estimate firm fixed-effects models based on data from the German innovation survey. We find that the GDPR led to a substantial shift from radical to incremental product innovation. Our finding indicates that the GDPR stimulated firms to re-organise their data management in a more profound way than they would have done in the absence of the regulation, opening up opportunities for improving existing products. The additional resources needed for complying with the GDPR limited their capacity for developing entirely new products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation is crucial to economic development. Innovation expenditures in Germany's business sector as well as public funding for science and research have been increasing in the past decade. However, the share of businesses with innovations – especially among the small- and medium-sized ones – decreased from 70% in the 2010s to 50% in 2022. Likewise the share of sales from new products and collaborations between science and industry have been declining in recent years. This might be explained by certain barriers to innovation. Increasingly important hampering factors are the lack of qualified employees and the burden of regulation and bureaucracy. Policy measures to support Germany's innovation capacity should tackle the reduction of such constraints that currently reduce the return to investment into R&D and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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For the formation of new verbs, Persian very productively employs complex predicates, while the derivation of simple verbs has been held to be marginal or even inexistent. We use data from internet fora, blogs, and messaging services to argue that the derivation of simple verbs from nominals is a productive process at least among speakers of colloquial Persian who actively use online media. Two acceptability tests of seven verbs and two 'placebo verbs' conducted among 58 participants produced more than 7,000 gradings. They show that such verbs are surprisingly well accepted, with statistically significant differences depending on age, gender, region, TAM form, and the individual verbs. Some of these results seem quite straightforward (e.g., acceptance declining with age), others rather not (for instance, the present and past progressive is very well accepted). The results run counter to the assumption that a gradual substitution of synthetic structures (simple verbs) by analytical ones (complex predicates) is a unidirectional process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]