Evidence
Empirical evidence worldwide points to a positive link between technological innovation and economic performance. The drive of biotech firms in Germany was due to the R&D subsidies to joint projects, network partners, and close cognitive distance of collaborative partners within a cluster. These factors increased patent performance in the biotech industry. Additionally, innovation capacity explains much of the GDP growth in India and China between 1981–2004 but especially in the 1990s. Their development of a National Innovation System through heavy investment of R&D expenditures and personnel, patents, and high-tech/service exports strengthened their innovation capacity. By linking the science sector with the business sector, establishing incentives for innovative activities, and balancing the import of technology and indigenous R&D effort, both countries experienced rapid economic growth in recent decades. Also, the Council of Foreign Relations asserted that since the end of the 1970s, the U.S. has gained a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth through their aggressive pursuit of technological change, demonstrating that technological innovation is a central catalyst of steady economic performance. Concisely, evidence shows that innovation contributes to steady economic growth and rise in per capita income.
However, some empirical studies investigating the innovation-performance-link lead to rather mixed results and indicate that the relationship be more subtle and complex than commonly assumed. In particular, the relationship between innovativeness and performance seems to differ in intensity and significance across empirical contexts, environmental circumstances, and conceptual dimensions.
Read more about this topic: Innovation Economics
Famous quotes containing the word evidence:
“I believe that no characteristic is so distinctively human as the sense of indebtedness we feel, not necessarily for a favor received, but even for the slightest evidence of kindness; and there is nothing so boorish, savage, inhuman as to appear to be overwhelmed by a favor, let alone unworthy of it.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“Important as fathers are, their influence on children shouldn’t be exaggerated just because they were ignored so long. There is no evidence that there is something especially good about fathers as caretakers. There are no areas where it can be said that fathers must do certain things in order to achieve certain outcomes in children. The same goes for mothers.”
—Michael Lamb (late–20th century)
“I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)