Are innovations getting harder to create? Evidence from Germany
(2018) EKHS31 20181Department of Economic History
- Abstract (Swedish)
- Innovations and economic growth are tightly connected. They are responsible for the humanity’s progress into a modern and industrialized society; they improved welfare, life quality and solved problems in diverse fields. Implicitly, it is expected that innovations will continue to do so. However, some statistics reveal that this view might be overly optimistic, as investments in innovative activities are not leading to the expected outputs for several decades. While the systemic perspective of economic theory suggests that this is caused by the timely clustering nature of innovation resulting in long waves of economic development, other researchers argue that innovative activities in general are subject of declining productivity. This... (More)
- Innovations and economic growth are tightly connected. They are responsible for the humanity’s progress into a modern and industrialized society; they improved welfare, life quality and solved problems in diverse fields. Implicitly, it is expected that innovations will continue to do so. However, some statistics reveal that this view might be overly optimistic, as investments in innovative activities are not leading to the expected outputs for several decades. While the systemic perspective of economic theory suggests that this is caused by the timely clustering nature of innovation resulting in long waves of economic development, other researchers argue that innovative activities in general are subject of declining productivity. This thesis investigates innovative activities in Germany by analysing the productivity of inventors, the patenting team size and research productivity to find out which of these effects prevailed. The results show, that the productivity of research shows a long wave development confirming the systemic perspective of economic theory. However, the productivity of inventors seems to decline over time and the share of large patenting teams increased. This might indicate that the creation of innovations is getting harder, depends increasingly on collaboration and is therefore leading to rising costs. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/8950247
- author
- Schupsky, Ole LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- EKHS31 20181
- year
- 2018
- type
- H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
- subject
- keywords
- innovation, patents, economic theory, complexity
- language
- English
- id
- 8950247
- date added to LUP
- 2018-06-21 13:40:34
- date last changed
- 2018-06-21 13:40:34
@misc{8950247,
abstract = {{Innovations and economic growth are tightly connected. They are responsible for the humanity’s progress into a modern and industrialized society; they improved welfare, life quality and solved problems in diverse fields. Implicitly, it is expected that innovations will continue to do so. However, some statistics reveal that this view might be overly optimistic, as investments in innovative activities are not leading to the expected outputs for several decades. While the systemic perspective of economic theory suggests that this is caused by the timely clustering nature of innovation resulting in long waves of economic development, other researchers argue that innovative activities in general are subject of declining productivity. This thesis investigates innovative activities in Germany by analysing the productivity of inventors, the patenting team size and research productivity to find out which of these effects prevailed. The results show, that the productivity of research shows a long wave development confirming the systemic perspective of economic theory. However, the productivity of inventors seems to decline over time and the share of large patenting teams increased. This might indicate that the creation of innovations is getting harder, depends increasingly on collaboration and is therefore leading to rising costs.}},
author = {{Schupsky, Ole}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Are innovations getting harder to create? Evidence from Germany}},
year = {{2018}},
}