Les Jeunes Entreprises Technologiques (JET) ont des besoins financiers importants aux premiers stades tandis que la plupart des marchés des capitaux entrepreneuriaux restent moins développés en Europe qu’aux Etats-Unis. Cette situation conduit les pouvoirs publics à créer des dispositifs financiers, dont des subsides, pour soutenir ces JET. Selon la Public Sponsorship Theory, ces subsides devraient soulager le contrainte de financement qui pèse sur les JET et ainsi leur permettre de poursuivre leur développement jusqu’à attirer des investisseurs ou vivre de leurs ventes. Pour autant, l’évaluation empirique de ces subsides a produit des résultats critiques. Cette thèse étudie ces critiques à Bruxelles, un environnement européen interventionniste typique, en répondant à la question « Pourquoi les Jeunes Entreprises Technologiques font elles appel aux subsid¬¬es et comment ceux-ci affectent-ils leur développement?».Cette thèse est constituée d’articles de recherche réalisés à l’aide de stratégies qualitatives supportées par des études de cas. Le Chapitre 2 présente les études de cas de 10 JET et répond aux questions :« Comment les JET se financent-elles aux premiers stades ?» et « Quel est le rôle des aides publiques dans ces stratégies de financement ?». Il décrit un écosystème bruxellois où les JET parviennent à se financer mais où les subsides sont particulièrement présents à tous les stades. Le Chapitre 3 étudie la construction et la succession des tours de table au sein de 8 JET sur une période de trois ans après leur création. En particulier, il répond aux questions :« Les subsides répondent-ils à des contraintes de financement liées à un manque d’offre de fonds ?», « Pourquoi les JET font-elles appel aux subsides ?» et « Les subsides signalent-ils les JET aux investisseurs ?». Il souligne que l’opportunisme et la volonté d’éviter la dilution sont des motifs fréquents pour demander des subsides. Il met aussi en lumière que ces derniers sont fréquemment alloués selon une stratégie de type « picking the winners » où les meilleurs JET, aussi les plus indépendantes, reçoivent le plus d’aides publiques. Finalement, le Chapitre 4 adopte une perspective centrée sur les ressources et étudie le rôle des subsides au sein de configurations de ressources humaines, sociales et financières. Nous avons utilisé la Qualitative Comparative Analysis, en progression dans la recherche sur l’entrepreneuriat, sur un échantillon de 31 JET ICT afin de répondre aux questions suivantes :« Quelles sont les configurations de ressources qui conduisent à la croissance des ventes des JET ?», « Quelles sont les configurations de ressources qui permettent aux JET d’attirer des investisseurs ?» et « Comment les subsides contribuent-ils à ces configurations ?». Au terme de cette analyse, nous présentons une taxonomie de cinq types de JET basée sur leur mix de ressources à la création. Ces types soulignent le rôle central du capital humain dans la croissance des ventes et l’attraction d’investisseurs, et ce, tandis que les subsides jouent un rôle secondaire.Ces résultats offrent une réponse à notre question de recherche. En ce qui concerne les raisons d’utiliser les subsides, l’absence d’alternative due à des contraintes de financements est rare, et ce, tandis que la majorité des demandes sont guidées par l’opportunisme et/ou la volonté d’éviter ou limiter la dilution. En ce qui concerne l’impact de ces subsides, leur rôle apparaît secondaire dans le développement commercial et financier des JET.Finalement, ces conclusions permettent de formuler des recommandations à destination des praticiens. Aux décideurs politiques, nous conseillons de revoir les modalités d’attribution des subsides pour les limiter aux équipes dotées d’un capital humain fort. De plus, nous suggérons d’encourager les initiatives destinées à renforcer la complémentarité des équipes entrepreneuriales et les aider à s’insérer dans des réseaux d’affaires. Aux entrepreneurs, nous recommandons de prêter une attention particulière à la complémentarité de leurs équipes, et ce, tant sur les plans techniques que commerciaux. / New Technology-Based Firms (NTBF) have high financial needs at early stage while most European entrepreneurial equity markets remain less developed than in the United States. This threatens their development and the expected loss of regional spillovers pushes policy makers to create financial schemes such as grants to support them. According to Public Sponsorship Theory, grants should offer NTBF a relief from funding constraints and enable them to continue their development until they get support of investors or their sales allow self-financing. However, empirical evaluation of the relevance and impact of grants has been mostly critical. This PhD investigates these criticisms in Brussels, a typical western European interventionist region, by answering the question “Why do New Technology-Based Firms use grants and how do they affect their development?”.Our PhD is made of three empirical research papers carried out following qualitative research strategies resting on multiple case studies. Chapter 2 presents case studies of 10 NTBF to answer the questions: “How do NTBF finance themselves at early stages?” and “What is the role of public aids in these financing strategies?”. It describes a Brussels ecosystem in which NTBF manage to finance themselves but where grants are particularly present at every stage. Chapter 3 studies the design and succession of financing rounds within 8 NTBF over three years after incorporation. In particular, we answer the questions: “Are grants to NTBF answering to supply-sided financing constraints?”, “Why do NTBF apply for grants?” and “Are grants signalling NTBF to investors?”. It highlights that opportunism and the avoidance of dilution are common motives for grants applications and that these are regularly allocated following a “picking the winners’ strategy. Finally, Chapter 4 adopts a resource-based perspective by studying the role of grants within resource configurations of human, social and financial capital. Based on a sample of 31 ICT NTBF, we used Qualitative Comparative Analysis, an approach still in its infancy in entrepreneurship research, to answer the following questions: “What are the resource configurations that lead to the sales growth of NTBF?”, “What are the resource configurations that lead NTBF attract equity?” and “How do grants contribute to these configurations?”. At the end of the analysis, we present a five type’s taxonomy of NTBF based on their resource mixes at incorporation. These types underscore the central role of human capital in achieving sales growth and attracting equity as well as the secondary role of grants.Results of Chapter 2, 3 and 4 allow answering our main research question. Regarding the reasons for using grants, the absence of alternative due to supply-sided constraints is rare while the overwhelming majority of requests are guided by opportunism and/or the desire to avoid or limit dilution. Regarding the impact of grants, their role appears secondary in both the commercial and financial development of NTBF.Finally, these findings lead to recommendations to practitioners. To policy makers, we advise rethinking the modalities of grants and limit their availability to teams with strong human capital. Additionally, we suggest to spur initiatives to help entrepreneurial teams strengthening their complementarity and inserting themselves within business networks. To entrepreneurs, we recommend to pay particular attention to the complementarity of their founding team on both the technical and commercial axes. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The research performed throughout this dissertation aims at implementing quantitative methods in order to assess economic and technological performances of firms, i.e. it tries to assess the impacts of the determinants of technological activity on the results of this activity. For this purpose, a representative sample of the most important R&D firms in the world is constituted. The micro-economic nature of the analysis, as well as its international dimension are two main features of this research at the empirical level. The second chapter illustrates the importance of R&D investments, patenting activities and other measures of technological activities performed by firms over the last 10 years. The third chapter describes the main features as well as the construction of the database. The raw data sample consists of comparable detailed micro-level data on 2676 large manufacturing firms from several countries. These firms have reported important R&D expenditures over the period 1980-1994. The fourth chapter explores the dynamic structure of the patent-R&D relationship by considering the number of patent applications as a function of present and lagged levels of R&D expenditures. R&D spillovers as well as technological and geographical opportunities are taken into account as additional determinants in order to explain patenting behaviours. The estimates are based on recently developed econometric techniques that deal with the discrete non-negative nature of the dependent patent variable as well as the simultaneity that can arise between the R&D decisions and patenting. The results show evidence of a rather contemporaneous impact of R&D activities on patenting. As far as R&D spillovers are concerned, these externalities have a significantly higher impact on patenting than own R&D. Furthermore, these effects appear to take more time, three years on average, to show up in patents. The fifth chapter explores the contribution of own stock of R&D capital to productivity performance of firms. To this end the usual productivity residual methodology is implemented. The empirical section presents a first set of results which replicate the analysis of previous studies and tries to assess the robustness of the findings with regard to the above issues. Then, further results, based on different sub samples of the data set, investigate to what extent the R&D contribution on productivity differs across firms of different industries and geographic areas or between small and large firms and low and high-tech firms. The last section explores more carefully the simultaneity issue. On the whole, the estimates indicate that R&D has a positive impact on productivity performances. Yet, this contribution is far from being homogeneous across the different dimensions of data or according to the various assumptions retained in the productivity model. The last empirical chapter goes deeper into the analysis of firms' productivity increases, by considering besides own R&D activities the impact of technological spillovers. The chapter begins by surveying the alternative ways proposed in the literature in order to asses the effect of R&D spillovers on productivity. The main findings reported by some studies at the micro level are then outlined. Then, the framework to formalize technological externalities and other technological determinants is exposed. This framework is based on a positioning of firms into a technological space using their patent distribution across technological fields. The question of whether the externalities generated by the technological and geographic neighbours are different on the recipient's productivity is also addressed by splitting the spillover variable into a local and national component. Then, alternative measures of technological proximity are examined. Some interesting observations emerge from the empirical results. First, the impact of spillovers on productivity increases is positive and much more important than the contribution of own R&D. Second, spillover effects are not the same according to whether they emanate from firms specialized in similar technological fields or firms more distant in the technological space. Finally, the magnitude and direction of these effects are radically different within and between the pillars of the Triad. While European firms do not appear to particularly benefit from both national and international sources of spillovers, US firms are mainly receptive to their national stock and Japanese firms take advantage from the international stock.

The thesis brings together three independent essays on the economics of innovation. I analyse the impact of competition on firm-level innovation (chapter 1) and the impact of different types of innovation on firm performance (chapter 2) looking at the top business R&D spenders of the world. I, then, switch my focus on researchers and analyse the determinants of brain drain in Europe (chapter 3).The first chapter is co-authored by Anabela Santos (European Commission) and Michele Cincera (ULB) and aims at assessing the impact of competition on firm-level innovation. The sample is composed of the world top corporate R&D spenders listed in the EU 2017 industrial R&D Scoreboard, and the analysis covers the years spanning from 2007 to 2016. We use an industry-year indicator, the inverse of the Lerner Index, as the indicator of competition for these firms that are leading in innovation efforts in the industries they are operating at the worldwide. R&D expenditures are used as the proxy for innovation. Model is estimated using two-stage least squares, to control for potential endogeneity of the competition indicator. Results confirm the existence of an inverted-U shaped relationship between competition and innovation. Further analysis is undertaken splitting the overall firm sample into services and manufacturing sectors according to technology and knowledge intensities and into the country of headquarters. We validate the inverted-U shaped relationship between competition and innovation for the firms in medium-high- and high-tech manufacturing sectors whereas we do not observe this impact for the firms operating in medium-low- and low-tech manufacturing sectors nor in services sectors. We also find differences in innovation behaviour of firms headquartered in the EU, US, Japan and China. While the inverted-U shaped relationship is highly pronounced for the Chinese firms, we find the U shaped impact of competition on the innovation of the EU and Japanese firms.The second chapter brings together firm-level R&D spending information with patent information, and aims at investigating the impact of different types of patented inventions on firm output growth performance controlling for R&D spending and other firm financials. The firm sample is sourced from the EU 2014 Industrial R&D Scoreboard that brings together the leading private sector R&D investors of the world. The analysis covers the years from 2005 to 2010. I consider forward-looking patent value indicators of breakthrough and general innovation using 7-year citation window, and backward-looking patent value indicators of originality and radicalness in innovation activities. Firm performance is estimated through a Cobb-Douglas production function. I allow for non-linearity in the relationship between innovation strategy and firm performance, and investigate sectoral heterogeneity looking at the impact in health industries and ICT producers. Models are estimated using two-stage least squares and generalised method of moments to control for potential endogeneity of innovation indicators. The findings confirm certain non-linearities and sectoral heterogeneities in the relationships between the different types of innovation and firm performance. ICT producers are growing with breakthrough innovations, generality and novelty in innovation process supporting the general-purpose technology feature of ICT. I, however, do not find a positive impact of technological breakthroughs nor a specific trend of generality and novelty in innovation process on productivity of pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms in the sample.The third chapter is co-authored by Christophe Colassin (ULB) and Michele Cincera (ULB) and aims at analysing the determinants of brain drain in Europe where there exists unbalances and polarisation between the States in terms of attractiveness for researchers despite the common policies and practices put in place by the European Union. The information about the mobility outflows are sourced from Centre for Science and Technology Studies and concern the year 2019. In order to analyse the macroeconomic determinants of mobility of researchers, the chapter brings together information from various data sources that attribute country-level values to the potential determinants of mobility outflows. We use a gravity model framework to detect quantitatively the pull and push factors of researchers' mobility including the 28 EU Member states in the time of analysis, and 3 additional Schengen countries, Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. In addition to the cultural and geographic proximity, we find that a country’s researcher base, entrepreneurial opportunities, knowledge intensity, public R&D spending and international collaborations increase the mobility of researchers within Europe whereas non-academic placements of researchers and the perception of virtual mobility as an alternative decrease the mobility. Researchers from countries with attractive research systems, more innovative private sector and more female researchers are found to be more mobile, whereas, the ones with higher GDP growth rates are less. We find that satisfaction with the recruitment process and the salary levels are decreasing factors for the mobility outflows. Finally, while fixed-term contracts in academia are found to be a factor that decreases the attractiveness; satisfaction with recruitment process, existence of the top R&D spending enterprises in the economy, and the freedom of academic exchange and dissemination are the factors that increases the attractiveness of a country for mobility inflows. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The research performed throughout this dissertation aims at implementing quantitative methods in order to assess economic and technological performances of firms, i.e. it tries to assess the impacts of the determinants of technological activity on the results of this activity. For this purpose, a representative sample of the most important R&D firms in the world is constituted. The micro-economic nature of the analysis, as well as its international dimension are two main features of this research at the empirical level.<p><p>The second chapter illustrates the importance of R&D investments, patenting activities and other measures of technological activities performed by firms over the last 10 years.<p><p>The third chapter describes the main features as well as the construction of the database. The raw data sample consists of comparable detailed micro-level data on 2676 large manufacturing firms from several countries. These firms have reported important R&D expenditures over the period 1980-1994.<p><p>The fourth chapter explores the dynamic structure of the patent-R&D relationship by considering the number of patent applications as a function of present and lagged levels of R&D expenditures. R&D spillovers as well as technological and geographical opportunities are taken into account as additional determinants in order to explain patenting behaviours. The estimates are based on recently developed econometric techniques that deal with the discrete non-negative nature of the dependent patent variable as well as the simultaneity that can arise between the R&D decisions and patenting. The results show evidence of a rather contemporaneous impact of R&D activities on patenting. As far as R&D spillovers are concerned, these externalities have a significantly higher impact on patenting than own R&D. Furthermore, these effects appear to take more time, three years on average, to show up in patents.<p><p>The fifth chapter explores the contribution of own stock of R&D capital to productivity performance of firms. To this end the usual productivity residual methodology is implemented. The empirical section presents a first set of results which replicate the analysis of previous studies and tries to assess the robustness of the findings with regard to the above issues. Then, further results, based on different sub samples of the data set, investigate to what extent the R&D contribution on productivity differs across firms of different industries and geographic areas or between small and large firms and low and high-tech firms. The last section explores more carefully the simultaneity issue. On the whole, the estimates indicate that R&D has a positive impact on productivity performances. Yet, this contribution is far from being homogeneous across the different dimensions of data or according to the various assumptions retained in the productivity model.<p><p>The last empirical chapter goes deeper into the analysis of firms' productivity increases, by considering besides own R&D activities the impact of technological spillovers. The chapter begins by surveying the alternative ways proposed in the literature in order to asses the effect of R&D spillovers on productivity. The main findings reported by some studies at the micro level are then outlined. Then, the framework to formalize technological externalities and other technological determinants is exposed. This framework is based on a positioning of firms into a technological space using their patent distribution across technological fields. The question of whether the externalities generated by the technological and geographic neighbours are different on the recipient's productivity is also addressed by splitting the spillover variable into a local and national component. Then, alternative measures of technological proximity are examined. Some interesting observations emerge from the empirical results. First, the impact of spillovers on productivity increases is positive and much more important than the contribution of own R&D. Second, spillover effects are not the same according to whether they emanate from firms specialized in similar technological fields or firms more distant in the technological space. Finally, the magnitude and direction of these effects are radically different within and between the pillars of the Triad. While European firms do not appear to particularly benefit from both national and international sources of spillovers, US firms are mainly receptive to their national stock and Japanese firms take advantage from the international stock.<p> / Doctorat en sciences économiques, Orientation économie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The Thesis is composed by three complementary research investigations on the economic and policy aspects of EU corporate R&D.Collectively, the work first reviews the theoretical and empirical literature of corporate R&D intensity decomposition; it then investigates the EU R&D intensity and its decomposition elements comparatively with most closed competitors and with emerging economies over the period 2005-2013. Finally, it inspects further some key aspects that can be associated to the EU R&D intensity gap: sectoral dynamics and the resulting sectoral and technological specialisations as well as the drivers for R&D investment growth across sectors and firms' age groups of top R&D investing firms over time. These studies also address the possible policy implications that derive from their outcomes.The investigations rely on literature as well as on company data, mainly from nine editions (2006-2014) of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. For analytical purposes they use literature review, meta-analysis, descriptive statistics, R&D intensity decomposition computational approach, Manhattan distance and Technological Revealed Comparative Advantage metrics, and a multinominal logit regression model. The results of these three research works are novel in several aspects. It indicates that literature results on R&D intensity decomposition differ because of data and methodological heterogeneities, and that the structural cause is the main determinant of EU R&D intensity gap if sector compositions of the countries are considered. It inspects how the use of different data sources and analytical methods impact differently on R&D intensity decomposition results, and what the analytical and policy implications are.The empirical research results of this Thesis confirm the structural nature of the EU R&D intensity gap. In the last decade the gap between the EU and the USA has widened, whereas the EU gap with Japan has remained relatively stable. In contrast, the emerging countries' R&D intensity gap compared to the EU has remained relatively stable, while companies from emerging economies are considerably reducing such gap. Besides, as novel contribution to the state of the art of the literature, this Thesis uncovers the differences between EU and US by inspecting which sectors, countries and firms are more accountable for the aggregate R&D intensity performance of these two economies, and it finds a high heterogeneity of firms' R&D intensity within sectors. Furthermore, it shows that there is a bigger population of both larger and smaller US top R&D firms which invest more strongly in R&D than competitors, and that the global R&D investment is concentrated in a few firms, countries and industries. Finally, the research founds a slightly higher EU R&D shift over sectors compared to the US, but not strongly enough towards high-tech sectors. Also, the EU has an even broader technological specialisation than its already broad industrial R&D sector specialisation, while the USA leads by number of technological fields belonging mostly to the industrial R&D sectors of its specialisation. Furthermore, the EU has been better able than the USA and Japan to maintain its world share of R&D investment even during the years of economic and financial crisis. Lastly, the study also indicates that firms make a complementary use of capital expenditures and R&D intensity for their R&D investment growth strategies and it reveals that there are differences in their use between firms' age classes across sectors. Overall, the main results of the Thesis suggest that to reach a more positive R&D dynamics and boost its competitiveness, the EU should adapt its industrial structure and increase the weight of high R&D intensive sectors. A focus on creating the conditions for firm creation and growth in new-emerging innovative sectors is advised together with favouring the exploitation of the full capacity of EU leading - but mature - sectors to also absorb high-technology from other sectors. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished