The impact of science and technology parks on firms’ product innovation: empirical evidence from Spain

Abstract

Science and Technology Parks (STP) are one of the most important and extensive innovation policy initiatives introduced in recent years. This work evaluates the impact of STP on firm product innovation in the Spanish context. Spain is less developed than most of the advanced countries, and regional and national governments are prioritizing STP initiatives. The large firm sample for our study is from the Spanish Technological Innovation Survey, provided by the National Statistical Institute. We focus on average treatment effects for firms located in 22 Spanish STP. Our results show that Spanish STP have a strong and positive impact on the probability and amount of product innovation achieved by STP located firms. These results hold for different assumptions about the mechanisms underlying location in a STP.

Government support and firm innovation performance in Chinese science and technology parks: The perspective of firm and sub‐park heterogeneity

“…Additionally, the influence of a firm's age and export on new product output is positive and significant, which is in line with previous studies (Vásquez‐Urriago, Barge‐Gil, Rico, & Paraskevopoulou, 2014); while compared with the output of new products, firm's age plays a more important role in patents as more experienced firms have capacity to resist more risks and operate longer‐term investment. High‐tech firms exert better innovation performance as these firms typical have stronger innovation capacity; R&D capacity indicated by the percentage of employees with master degrees has a positive and significant effect on firms' patent outputs but has a negative relationship with firms' new product outputs, This result suggests that R&D capacity may not be an important contributor to tenant firms' innovation performance for new products; regarding ownership structure, private firms perform better in patents and worse in new products, while SOEs exhibit outstanding innovation performance in new product, which reflects to some extent that private firms may be more active in R&D for new technology while SOEs still have obvious advantages in exploitation of new products.…”

The influence of Science and Technology Park characteristics on firms' innovation results

“…In the first step, STP location is estimated as a function of the covariates plus a new variable, which act as an identifier for the model. This new variable is parksupply , which has been proposed by Vásquez‐Urriago et al (). We follow them in defining it as the number of companies located in an STP as a percentage of total companies in the region in which the company is located.…”

“…This notable diffusion is most likely due to the strong interest of regional governments, which are shareholders of most STPs, and also of the central government, which has implemented sets of policies specifically designed to support STPs (Albahari et al ) and whose investment is estimated at over €1,600 million (COTEC ). These figures have led some authors to claim that STPs have been one of the major innovation policies in Spain (Vásquez‐Urriago et al ).…”

Effects of the Slovak Science Parks and Research Centers

“…Firmy usadené v parkoch spolupracujú aj s inými partnermi a to aj mimo park a región (Minguillo et al, 2015). Parky majú pozitívny vplyv na pravdepodobnosť vzniku a množstvo inovácií produktov vytvorených podnikmi usadenými v parkoch (Vásquez-Urriago, et. al., 2014).…”