The early phases of innovation : opportunities and challenges of public private partnership

Abstract

Innovations have acquired a key-role in the growth and competition strategies of firms in today’s globalized world. Governments in many, in developed as well as in developing, countries recognize the need to promote innovations and fund innovative projects; particularly those carried out in cooperation with other public sector institutions such as universities and specialized R&D institutions. This public-private partnership seems particularly useful in the early phases of innovation.

This article discusses how the cooperation between the industry, the academia and the government may be utilized in the early phases of innovation (idea generation, evaluation and selection) to increase the innovative capability of firms in a given region or sector. For the purpose of identifying the opportunities and challenges of such collaboration this paper presents selected findings of two recent empirical surveys carried out at our institute. The focus of attention is centred on the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) which, on account of resource constraints, are usually more dependent on cooperation than big firms.