An essay on the appropriate indicators to measure innovation in the Portuguese firms. An approach for the less advanced regions facing knowledge economies

The Portuguese firms are mostly small or medium sized and do not have an R&D department and lack qualified personnel to develop it inside the enterprise. The business goals are often linked to what the owners desire for their firms and they usually consider innovation a very expensive and risky activity. The level of trust between economic actors is lower than most of the OECD countries which is responsible for many institutional, cultural and financial constraints that limit the entrepreneurial capacity to diversify. This helps to understand the small levels of international transfer of technologies and required patents to world Offices. Some studies show that the R&D efforts are not always directly related with economic performance, specially in less advanced regions. This work tries to investigate new indicators for the modes of learning in innovative firms of less advanced regions like Portugal and proposes a methodology to address a different approach from those that have been used for more advanced regions. The aspects related with behaviour, absorption of local sources of innovation and collaboration are some of the factors to have in mind when evaluating innovation in this new approach. The overall implication of the results is that no one existing index dominates in explaining how firms attempt to innovate. Instead, we require a richer conceptual perspective that combines diverse issues. Firms face strong obstacles that limit their abilities and propensity to innovate. At the same time, though, firms face strong competitive pressures to undertake innovating actions. Entrepreneurs need to develop new theories and methods concerning the intersection between these pressures