Do firms publish? A multi-sectoral analysis
JRC Working Papers on Corporate R&D and Innovation No 05/2018
This paper aims to increase our understanding of the phenomenon of corporate publishing - i.e. firms’ involvement in the production of scientific publications - by addressing two key research questions. We first address the why do firms publish question. To do so, we develop a framework of five categories of incentives for firms to publish on the basis of a systematic review of the literature: (i) accessing external knowledge and resources; (ii) attracting and retaining researchers; (iii) signaling and reputation building; (iv) supporting IP strategies; and (v) supporting commercialization strategies.
Second, we address the how do firms’ engagement in publishing differ across sectors question. We provide evidence that extant literature has not characterized this phenomenon is a comprehensive manner. Thus, we present an empirical analysis of the publication activity of a global sample of 2,500 firms (and of about 570,000 subsidiaries of these firms) operating in 20 industrial sectors. We find that corporate publishing is not a feature of few sectors although considerable heterogeneity exists within and among sectors. A considerable proportion (84%) of firms in our sample contributed to at least one publication from 2011 to 2015. The analysis also suggests that the number of firms’ publications grew over the observation period (2.3% on a yearly basis), but the phenomenon of corporate publishing grew at a lower pace than the whole production of scientific publications. Firms’ publications are often co-authored with researchers at academic institutions (58%) and are cited more than expected (about 12% of firms’ articles are within the top 10% most cited articles). We then conclude the paper proposing a taxonomy of sectors on the basis of sectors’ intensity of R&D investment and publication activity
CAMERANI Roberto;
ROTOLO Daniele;
GRASSANO Nicola;
2018-10-24
European Commission
JRC113261
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC113261,
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