New product sales are hard to predict. Our analysis of sales performance two years after market launch reveals that three groups of factors do not increase the accuracy of predicting new product sales: (1) A firm's general experience and experience with innovation; (2) High technological competences and strong knowledge networks; (3) Customer involvement in new product development. R&D managers should realise that experience with innovation as well as high technological competences, while possibly helpful during the development stage, do not necessarily enhance an accurate prediction of new product sales. Moreover, other than intuitively expected, networking can be ambiguous: It reduces uncertainty about future sales performance by providing information; but it may also enhance knowledge leaking to competitors, thus increasing probabilities of unexpected failure.

Can the knowledge base of an economy be measured? In this study, we combine the perspective of regional economics on the interrelationships among technology, organization, and territory with the triple-helix model, and offer the mutual information in three dimensions as an indicator of the configuration. When this probabilistic entropy is negative, the configuration reduces the uncertainty that prevails at the systems level. Data about more than a million Dutch companies are used for testing the indicator. The data contain postal codes (geography), sector codes (proxy for technology), and firm sizes in terms of number of employees (proxy for organization). The configurations are mapped at three levels: national (NUTS-1), provincial (NUTS-2), and regional (NUTS-3). The levels are cross-tabled with the knowledge-intensive sectors and services. The results suggest that medium-tech sectors contribute to the knowledge base of an economy more than high-tech ones. Knowledge-intensive services have an uncoupling effect, but less so at the high-tech end of these services.

This study examines the impact of external and internal scale economies on the decision to start exporting and the level of exports of innovating firms. Based on new trade theory, increasing returns to scale-both internal and external scale economies-are considered an important source of comparative and competitive advantage. The empirical analysis of (small) innovating firms in The Netherlands leads to two main findings. First, firms that are located in technical Marshallian clusters seem less inclined to become exporters. Availability of technical knowledge alone does not help to reduce entry costs that come with the decision to export and/or marketing and sales costs in order to achieve a higher export performance. Second, firms that experience difficulties in appropriating innovation rents due to labour poaching also seem to be less inclined to become exporters. The explanation for this second finding is the importance of outgoing knowledge spillovers, which is particularly relevant for small, product innovating firms. This reduces their probability to export. However, if firms export, the knowledge leaking argument is not valid for the export performance of the firm.

The creation of new knowledge is a haphazard process: not every sector in an economy is equally involved. The effect of industry structure on innovativeness has been a focus of attention for a long time by both academics and policymakers. In a much quoted article, using unique data – new-product announcements – Acs and Audretsch [Acs, Z.J., Audretsch, D.B., 1988. Innovation in large and small firms: an empirical analysis. American Economic Review 78(4), 678–690] identified several characteristics of industry structure and their effects on innovativeness. By analyzing a new and more consciously compiled database, we re-examine their original claims. Our results largely support their findings: industry concentration and degree of unionization for instance hamper innovation; skilled labor promotes it. Our findings diverge in one significant respect from theirs: we suggest that the large firms do not contribute more to an industry’s innovativeness than small firms. At the industry level, we find strong support for the Schumpeter Mark I perspective of creative destruction by small firms rather than creative accumulation by large firms. In addition, we show that less dedicated innovators prove more susceptible to firm-external industry factors than more committed innovators. An unfavorable competitive environment decreases the likelihood that less successful innovators will announce new products.

Innovation research builds on the analysis of micro level data describing innovative behaviour of individual firms. One increasingly popular type of data are Literature-based Innovation Output (LBIO) data. These are compiled by screening specialist trade journals for new-product announcements. Notwithstanding the substantial advantages, the eligibility of LBIO data for innovation research remains controversial. In this paper the merits of LBIO data are examined by means of comparative analysis. A newly built LBIO database is systematically compared with the widely used Community Innovation Survey. It shows that both databases identify similar innovators in terms of firm size, distribution across industries and degree of innovativeness: LBIO data can be considered a fully fledged alternative to traditional innovation data, highly eligible for innovation research.

The literature is inconclusive as to whether Marshallian specialization or Jacobian diversification externalities favor regional innovativeness. The specialization argument poses that regional specialization towards a particular industry improves innovativeness in that industry. Regional specialization allows for knowledge to spill over among similar firms. By contrast, the diversification thesis asserts that knowledge spills over between firms in different industries, causing diversified production structures to be more innovative. Building on an original database, we address this controversy for the Netherlands. We thereby advance on the literature by providing a two-level approach, at the region level and the firm level. At the regional level, we compare specialized with diversified regions on numbers of accommodated innovators. At the firm level, we establish causalities between externalities and degree of innovativeness. The results suggest Marshallian externalities: specialized regions accommodate increased numbers of innovating firms and, consistently, incumbent firms’ innovativeness increases with regional specialization. Once the product has been launched, innovators in diversified Jacobian regions prove more successful in commercial terms than innovators in specialized Marshallian regions.

In their seminal paper, Acs and Audretsch (1988) analyze innovation patterns across industries and identify several determinants of innovativeness, both positive and negative. Their work is seminal if only because of the unique data they use to measure innovativeness: new-product announcements. They show that industry concentration, degree of unionization would hamper innovation; industries characterized by increased shares of skilled labor and large firms provide favorable conditions for innovation. By analyzing a new and more consciously compiled database, we re-examine their original claims. Our results largely support the findings of Acs & Audretsch, but diverge from them in one important way. We suggest that the large firms do not contribute more to a industry’s innovativeness than small firms – a vindication of the Schumpeter Mark I perspective. In addition, we analyze micro-level data of individual firms. Firms within different sub-groups respond differently to their competitive environment. We show that less dedicated innovators prove more susceptible to environmental factors than more committed innovators. In addition, an unfavorable competitive environment decreases the likelihood that less successful innovators will announce new products.

The literature remains inconclusive as to whether Marshallian specialization or Jacobian diversification externalities favor regional innovativeness. The specialization thesis asserts that regions with production structures specialized towards a particular industry tend to be more innovative in that particular industry, as it allows for knowledge to spill over between similar firms. The diversification thesis argues that knowledge spills over between different industries, causing diversified production structures to be more innovative. A closely related debate evolves around local competitiveness hypotheses. Using an original database of innovation counts, both these issues are addressed for the Dutch context. The results show that the Marshallian specialization thesis holds, though more pronounced for R&D intensive and small firms. Fierce local competition within an industry negatively affects innovativeness in that particular industry.

This review examines 43 recent papers about factors behind success and failure of innovative projects. Nine out of the 43 papers report a larger number of possible causes for success or failure and provide some rank ordering. Analyzing these rankings we find that the nine studies have a significant degree of similarity among the ten highest-ranking success factors; however, there is little similarity among lower ranking factors. The various studies remain either inconsistent or inconclusive with respect to factors such as strength of competition, R&D intensity, the degree to which a project is "innovative" or "technologically advanced" and top management support. Agreement exists, however, about the positive impact on innovative success of factors such as firm culture, experience with innovation, the multidisciplinary character of the R&D team and explicit recognition of the collective character of the innovation process or the advantages of the matrix organization.

Counting Dutch new product announcements in specialist trade journals, we find that innovative firms are spread geographically close to the regional knowledge infrastructure and agglomeration externalities. The value added of this paper is that we examine the geographic scope of these externalities, thereby distinguishing between the local, regional and supra regional level.