Abstract
Public administrations have in recent years developed programs of public funding for innovation to boost the competitiveness of business. The study of how companies have used these funding sources generates knowledge to improve the design of support for private innovation and to provide advice for innovative companies. This paper investigates these issues in the agri-food sector which is of particular interest as it is comprised mainly of small and medium enterprises with a wide regional presence and interaction with their local environment. A survey on technological innovation was used to estimate panel logit models with random effects, taking as dependent variables three types of funding: regional, state and European Union. The results generally show a positive relationship between innovation efforts and access to public funding, but also significant differences between types of funding and between sectors. Food companies that obtain public funding tend to have a more innovative profile than Agriculture ones. Both types of firm present higher probabilities than others companies when it comes to gaining access to regional funding, though the opposite often occurs in the case of state funding. Firm size is not significant for regional funding and no overlap was detected between regional and state funding. The financial crisis has adversely affected regional and national aid, which experienced a significant decrease in the period from 2008 to 2013.
Highlights
In recent years public administrations have sought to become involved in promoting innovation by private firms
The main contributions of this study are: (1) three data panels have been extracted from PITEC data in the period 2008-2013 and these were studied separately in order to allow for differences and similarities in innovative behaviour according to production activities to appear, (2) in each of them three dependent variables are used covering public funding of innovation from the regional, state and European Union (EU) levels, and this makes it possible to compare alternative sources of funding; and (3) logit regression panel models with random effects, of which little use has been made for analyzing financial innovation, are employed here as they significantly improve the modelling of the intrinsic factors of each company
The probabilities of obtaining state funding are 25.3%, 4.2% and 6.3% while those of obtaining EU funding are much lower at 1.2%, 3.4% and 4%. This source of funding is more associated with firms carrying out technological cooperation and external R&D. Both with regard to regional and state funding the Agriculture companies that carry out technological cooperation and internal R&D have a higher probability of obtaining it than those with other combinations of innovation inputs
Summary
In recent years public administrations have sought to become involved in promoting innovation by private firms. The main contributions of this study are: (1) three data panels have been extracted from PITEC data in the period 2008-2013 (agricultural companies, food and other sectors) and these were studied separately in order to allow for differences and similarities in innovative behaviour according to production activities to appear, (2) in each of them three dependent variables are used covering public funding of innovation from the regional, state and European Union (EU) levels, and this makes it possible to compare alternative sources of funding; and (3) logit regression panel models with random effects, of which little use has been made for analyzing financial innovation, are employed here as they significantly improve the modelling of the intrinsic factors of each company
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