Internal and external sources of innovation in the Italian biotech sector
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Data
2009Autore
D'Amore, Rosamaria
Iorio, Roberto
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A common view among many academics and policy makers is that biotech
offers enormous opportunities for improving competitiveness and
economic growth. For this reason there is a growing need to set up
appropriate policy to improve the adoption and diffusion of biotech
innovation. Nevertheless, there are many interpretative problems about the
identification of the biotech firms, due to the uncertainty about the border
of the sector itself. This paper provides a contribution to better define and
understand the biotech industry, pointing out the differences inside the
sector and the different behaviour of the firms according to their typology.
In fact this paper, basing on a previous work of classification of the Italian
biotech firms according to the OECD standards, uses such a classification
in order to better understand the different importance, inside the biotech
sector, of the internal and external sources of knowledge, in the production
of innovation. Our hypothesis is, in fact, that the relation between internal
and external source, on one side, and innovation, on the other side, has
different characteristics if we distinguish between the different classes in
which the production activities are divided, according to the OECD
classification. We try to test this hypothesis trough the analysis of the data
coming from a questionnaire we submitted to several Italian biotech firms.