The impact of research and technology organizations on firm competitiveness : measurement and determinants

The objective of this work is to evaluate the impact of research and technology organizations (RTO) on firm competitiveness. To this end, we develop a framework that includes strategies to deal with the methodological problems highlighted in the literature. The main features of this framework are the definition and classification of different types of impacts, the estimation of (rough) quantitative measures of them and the development of a multivariate model to explain the different impacts including the traditional indicators of firm characteristics and their relationships. The empirical work is based on a database constructed from information from the responses to a questionnaire designed specifically to estimate the impact of RTOs on Spanish firms, and information from the Spanish Inno vation Survey. Our findings show that firms are able to recognize the influence of these relationships on different technical, economic, investment and intangible impacts and to roughly estimate their economic impact, and that several characteristics of these rela tionships affect the impact of RTOs.The authors acknowledge the financial support of FEDIT and the help provided by the Spanish Institute of Statistics. They also thank participants in DRUID 2009 Summer Conference for the comments received and Ángela Vásquez-Urriago for excellent research assistance. The usual disclaimer applies.Publicad