Search

While an increasing number of conceptual studies postulate that vocational education and training (VET) activities have a positive impact on firm-level innovation, empirical evidence on the subject remains scarce. This study exploits establishment data from a representative survey of German companies to estimate the association between firms' participation in initial VET and their innovation outcomes. The results based on linear probability models and entropy balancing show that the relationship between VET activity and innovation are more ambiguous than often postulated. Overall, the participation in initial VET has virtually no effect on radical product innovation. However, a positive association between VET activities and incremental product innovation or process innovation is found in the case of microenterprises with fewer than 10 employees. From this, we conclude that participation in the VET system primarily promotes the innovation and learning conditions of very small training enterprises. The paper concludes with implications for policy and research. Updated version (first published in 2021)

While an increasing number of studies postulate that vocational education and training (VET) activities have a positive impact on the innovative capacity of training companies, empirical evidence on the topic remains contradictory. This study exploits establishment data from a representative survey of German companies to estimate the relationship between firms' participation in initial VET and their innovation outcomes. Our results show that the direct effects of initial VET on technological innovation in small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) are on average quite weak. If at all, a training firm's initial VET activities are associated with production innovation activities and not with process innovation. Larger effects can only be observed in case of microenterprises with fewer than ten employees. In these firms, initial VET is associated with a higher probability of (local) new-to-market product innovation if it is accompanied by changes in organizational processes that support individual learning and knowledge creation. We conclude from this finding that the knowledge diffusion function of the VET system primarily holds relevance for the smallest of the training companies and that initial VET is only positively related to technological innovation when it goes along with organizational learning in the training company. Updated version

Notwithstanding a recent upsurge in interest in knowledge intermediaries and their roles in innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems, we know little about the interplay between the activities of academia driven intermediaries and their publicly financed counterparts. Building upon a combination of principles derived from the resource based theory and the entrepreneurial ecosystems literature, this paper investigates the potentials of cooperation between different knowledge intermediaries. Therefore, we analyze the alignment of financial, knowledge, market and network resources in politically funded regional alliances between university internal and university external intermediaries by the means of a qualitative approach. We find that while knowledge intermediaries can benefit from access to additional ecosystem specific resources, the urge to improve the own position within the ecosystem hampers the will for cooperation and can lead to non performing resource alignments. This paper contributes to current scholarly discussions by suggesting and testing a theoretical foundation for analyzing the cooperative behavior of knowledge intermediaries in innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Experiments are an important governance instrument to support niche development, promote niche-regime interaction, challenge existing regimes and manage transition pathways for sustainable development. However, policy and regulatory learning of experiments are under-explored in the transition experimentation literature. Thus, this paper examines the following research question: How is the up-take of regulatory experiments for sustainability transitions influenced by their design elements and what role do institutional dynamics play in their up-take? The paper uses comparative qualitative content analysis to examine 27 international cases of regulatory experiments. We analyze the up-take of experiment results towards the three dimensions of scalability, transferability and unintended consequences. The analysis demonstrates that the timeframe, timing, political support, regulatory context, geographical particularities, selection processes, evaluation procedures, test of different design options, heterogeneity of participants and communication processes are important influencing factors for the up-take of experiment results.

The 'doing-using-interacting mode' of innovation (DUI) is considered an important component of innovative activity. It describes informal innovative activities and thus complements the 'science-technology-innovation mode' (STI) based on research and development. While empirical measurement of the STI mode is well established, proxies for measuring DUI activities are still underdeveloped and no consensus has emerged concerning which intra- and extra-firm processes primarily constitute the DUI mode and how they should be measured. Based upon 81 in-depth interviews with German SMEs and regional innovation consultants, we propose a comprehensive set of 47 indicators comprising both established and new DUI processes for future empirical measurement. We argue that this measurement approach can lead to a more holistic understanding and ultimately quantifiable measurement of DUI innovativeness, which can guide further research and policymaking.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations provide normative orientation for many national and regional governments as well as actors from industry and other parts of the civil society. There is growing consensus that the corresponding transformation processes needed - e.g. in the field of production and consumption patterns (SDG 12) - have to be fostered by a corresponding institutional framework. Properly designed regulatory experiments that generate a learning system for all actors involved may be an important building block. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, we develop an overview of the various terminologies for regulatory experimentation currently discussed in the social sciences, derive common criteria for regulatory experimentation in reflexive governance structures and conclude in presenting a conceptual framework for analysing empirical studies of regulatory experiments.

Private innovative activities receive public innovation support from different political levels. Few studies have empirically evaluated the influence of political systems on the reception of public innovation support and no other studies have evaluated innovation support across Europe with CIS data. This paper analyses the differences between federal, semi-federal and centralist political systems with CIS data from sixteen European countries. The results show that regional programmes in federal and semi-federal countries reach firms with barriers to innovate, such as small and medium-sized enterprises, while other programmes only claim to reach them. Federal and semi-federal countries therefore support a broader variety of firms compared with centralist countries. European support reaches SMEs better in centralist countries compared with federal and semi-federal countries. Regular and higher expenditure on innovative activities shows a positive influence on the reception of support in all countries, while indicators such as market focus vary between countries and political levels. Regional programmes focus more strongly on companies with a regional market focus, which can be seen as another barrier to innovation. As a policy implication, the paper implies that barriers to innovation can be reduced by a decentralized innovation framework with stronger regional programmes.

Innovationen sind das Kernelement des Überlebens und der Positionierung von Volkswirtschaften, da sie zur Befriedigung der Marktbedürfnisse beitragen. Vor dem Hintergrund knapper Ressourcen werden jedoch regelmäßig nur die Innovationen realisiert, die aus einer betriebswirtschaftlichen Betrachtung vorteilhaft erscheinen und damit weniger als eigentlich sinnvoll wären. Zunehmend setzt sich allerdings die Erkenntnis durch, dass die betriebswirtschaftliche Marktabgrenzung und damit die traditionelle Wirtschaftlichkeitsbewertung von Innovationen und Innovationsprojekten zu eng sind. Vielmehr erfordert die heutige Innovationsbewertung eine Erweiterung um soziale und ökologische Aspekt, also eine nachhaltige Ausrichtung. Basierend auf dem Forschungsprojekt Nachhaltigkeitsorientierte Bewertung von Innovationsprojekten (NaBI) gibt dieses Papier einen Überblick über das Forschungsfeld und analysiert die Nachhaltigkeitstheorie im Hinblick auf Innovationen. Im Ergebnis wird die Festlegung auf ein bestimmtes Indikatorset für die jeweilige Nachhaltigkeitsebene (Satellitensystem) vorgeschlagen, in denen essenzielle Bestandteile mit festgelegten Grenzwerten vorgegeben sind.