Non-R&D innovation is a common economic phenomenon, though R&D has been the central focus of policy making and scholarly research in the field of innovation. An analysis of the third European Community Innovation Survey (CIS-3) results for 15 countries finds that almost half of innovative European firms did not perform R&D in-house. Firms with weak in-house innovative capabilities and which sou...

Public policy response to global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty. Theoretical work has shown that explicitly accounting for uncertainty and learning in climate change can have a large impact on optimal policy, especially technology policy. However, theory also shows that the specific impacts of uncertainty are ambiguous. In this paper, we provide a...

One of the key mechanisms of firms’ strategic renewal is R&D, and a key driver of the intensity of R&D is industry context. A number of theories develop propositions linking industry factors to firm R&D behavior, but these theories lack consensus. To date empirical tests have been unable to resolve the competing predictions due to lack of time-varying measures of technology. We create new measu...

This Viewpoint examines data on international trends in energy research and development (R&D) funding, patterns of U.S. energy technology patents and R&D funding, and U.S. R&D intensities across selected sectors. The data present a disturbing picture: (i) Energy technology funding levels have declined significantly during the past two decades throughout the industrial world; (ii) U.S. R&D spend...