The Portrait of Persistent Innovators in Greece

Abstract

Persistence in innovation is very important for national and firm growth. This paper contributes to the study of innovation persistence at firm level, focusing on Greece. Empirical research uses patent and survey data for this purpose. In this context, innovation persistence is examined for a sample of 300 Greek firms. Innovation activities are measured through related patents and persistence is determined by the number of patents that each firm has developed during the period 1988-2010. The analysis focuses on the main firm features behind innovation persistence. Results show that innovation is persistent, as nearly half of firms patent more than once and for subsequent years during the whole period of analysis. The phenomenon of innovation persistence is more obvious among a total number of 30 firms, the so-called “heavy persistent innovators”. Results show that these firms are involved in different economic activities at 2-digit level of analysis, have a small size based on their total number of employees, are characterized by different export shares, develop relatively many technologies based on the technological content of their patents and these new technologies are not usually related to their main production line. However, the analysis also confirms that there are inter-sectoral differences, implying that firm and technology-specific factors are important. The examination of firm-level innovation persistence could have clear implications for both innovation policy and the understanding of long-term industry dynamics. Especially now that Greece has started discussing restructuring its economy and re-planning its innovation policy, this paper could contribute to this discussion.