Research on The Measurement of Innovative Activity Professor Bruce Tether

Return to Bruce's Home Page

(My publications in this area)

Innovation and technological change are the ultimate source of all sustained economic growth, yet measuring innovative activities is fraught with difficulties. There are no ‘pure measures’ of innovative activity, but a set of proxies, the most widely used of which are R&D expenditures or employment, and patenting. These, however, relate to the more technical dimensions of innovation, and are of little relevance to large parts of the economy, such as traditional manufacturing and services.

Other approaches include the ‘object based approach’, which involves experts deciding what constitutes an innovation and then identifying and grading innovations, and the subject based approach, which is based on asking executives to judge their firm’s innovative achievements. The ‘subject based approach’ is used in the European Community Innovation Surveys (CIS).

Much of my research concerns services, and here the measurement of innovative activities is particularly difficult, as the innovations themselves are rarely autonomous artefacts which can be compared with past versions of similar artefacts. The idea that innovations can be compared over time gives rise to a sort of ‘innovation staircase’, or stepwise progression – see above. Conceptually, each innovation represents a step change improvement over its predecessor. Arguably this type of progress is typical of manufacturing and manufactured products. In services (and indeed in certain parts of manufacturing, where customisation is commonplace), by contrast, change tends to be much more continuous, so it is hard to identify particular innovations – there is more of an ‘innovation curve’ than an ‘innovation staircase’. Services are also tricky because the innovations are often ‘soft’ (procedural and organisational) rather than ‘hard’ (i.e., focused on the production and use of new technologies).

Publications

Papers I have written that relate to the measurement of innovative activities include:

B. S. Tether (2003) ‘How to Define a New Product and a New Process: A Review of Existing Approaches’, a Report for Competitive Business, Scottish Enterprise, August. A version of this report (pdf format) is available online.

B. S. Tether (2003) ‘The Sources and Aims of Innovation in Services: Variety Between and Within Sectors’, Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 12.6, 481-505

B. S. Tether and C. Hipp (2002), ‘Knowledge Intensive, Technical and Other Services: Patterns of Competitiveness and Innovation’, Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, 14.2, 163 – 182

B. S. Tether (2002), ‘Who Co-operates for Innovation, and Why? Research Policy, 31.6, 947 – 967 (21 pages). [N.B. According to Research Policy’s web-site, this paper was the journal’s third most frequently requested paper in 2002 (April – December), with 642 downloading requests]

J. Howells, B. S. Tether, D. Cox, S. Glynn and J. Rigby (2001) 'UK R&D Strengths in IT, Electronics and Communications (ITEC) and Creative Content Industries', Final Report for the Information Age Partnership, CRIC and PREST, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. (85 pages). Published on the internet by the Information Age Partnership – see www.iapuk.org

B. S. Tether, I. Miles, K. Blind, C. Hipp, N. de Liso and G. Cainelli (2001), Innovation in Services – An Analysis of CIS-2 data on Innovation in the Service Sector, A report for the European Commission (under CIS Contract 98/184). A version of this report (pdf format) is available online.

B. S. Tether (2001) ‘Identifying Innovation, Innovators and Innovative Behaviours: A Critical Assessment of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS)’, CRIC Discussion Paper No. 48, CRIC, University of Manchester and UMIST, Manchester, UK.

C. Hipp, B. S. Tether, and I. Miles (2000), ‘The Incidence and Effects of Innovation in Services; Evidence from Germany’, International Journal of Innovation Management, 4.4, 417-454

B. S. Tether (1998) ‘Small and Large Firms – Sources of Unequal Innovations?’, Research Policy, 27.7, 725-745

Email: Bruce.Tether[a]mbs.ac.uk