The Economics of Knowledge and Innovation: Pierre Mohnen

Professor Pierre Mohnen, Head of our Economics of Knowledge and Innovation Research Theme, talks about our priorities, partners and expected impacts: http://www.merit.unu.edu/themes/1-the-economics-of-knowledge-and-innovation/ TRANSCRIPTION: As the research leader of the research group that does research on the economics of innovation and theory of knowledge, we are mostly interested in working with microdata. This is probably what distinguishes our research group from the other research groups and we are mostly interested in issues related to innovation. So that can concern the economics of research and development: why firms do research and development, what's the importance of competition, what's the importance of government aid, what are the effects of research and development on growth, on productivity, on competition. Then we also look at innovation, innovation being the output of research and development investments and then the effects of innovation on productivity, exports, employment. So those are some of the topics that we are interested in. As I said, we rely on microdata, that is to say data at the level of the individual firms. That could be production statistics, employment, innovation, R&D efforts, energy consumption but also data on patents or on consumer surveys. What kind of goods consumers consume in different countries and what is the role of new products, innovation in terms of consumption. What are the expected impacts of this research theme? Our impact is in various ways. First of all we try to publish papers in various good scientific journals. Secondly we form students, PhD students and master students, so we supervise a certain number of PhD dissertations. Third we also do some consulting if you want, or we do some advising for governments, the Dutch government but also other governments, and international organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank, the OECD or the European Union. For instance we've had in the past a project where we were asked to think of ways to reform, or to look the effectiveness of the R&D tax credits in various countries or the effect innovation had on employment in Latin-American countries, or the effect of innovation on growth and productivity in different countries. So those are some of the things that we do and then every year we also organize an international conference which is called MEIDE (Micro Evidence on Innovation and Development) and this conference gathers people from around the world -- every year it's in a different location around the world -- people precisely interested in analysing the economics of innovation with statistical, technical methods, econometric methods, but also trying to see what kind of advice we can give to governments relating to innovation and the way they should organize the innovation. Do you also work on indicators? Indicators in the sense that what kind of indicators are best to use. Does it make a difference whether you use inputs for innovation like R&D expenditure or purchase of patents or whether you should look at outputs like as patents, the appearance of new products or publications, so these are more output measures. So which measures are the most correlated with growth or which explain best growth performance of different countries.