Innovation research 2014:Renewal of Manufacturing Radical & incremental innovation in industrial renewal (RAID)

Important results from the project

RAID focused on three specific areas in which the manufacturing industries of Finland and Sweden can contribute to and make use of radical innovations: 1) wood-based bioeconomy (process industry), 2) the machinery and equipment industry, and 3) university patenting as a whole where we addressed university patenting and asked how technology transfer has been affected

Expected long term effects

In the context of our cases, it may be argued that industrial renewal via radical innovation could be jeopardized in machinery and equipment as well as a few process industry segments. Public policy can play a vital role for (re)opening/maintaining pathways to radical innovation, but not without high-level system-wide actions, e.g. change of legislation and eco-system support for upscaling radical niches with potentially high societal impact, and in-depth knowledge of sector-specific challenges. The main finding in university patenting in Finland dropped following the reform.

Approach and implementation

The bioeconomic patent activities were detected by bibliometric and text mining methods. A set of thematic interviews with selected Machinery and Equipment industry companies in Finland and Sweden was conducted. Companies incorporated under NACE code 28 after 2009 were selected using the Orbis database. The research on university patenting took each patent record from the OECD PATSTAT data of European Patent Office (EPO) records listing at least one inventor with Finnish address. All those records were sent to Statistics Finland (StatFi) for linking with register data.