The Role of Time in Assessing the Economic Effects of R&D
This study investigates the impacts of R&D on firm performance. It extends previous research by constructing alternative stocks of R&D-Capital that take into account that time plays an important role in assessing the pay-off of industrial research. The results show that even when we employed R&D-Capitals that placed more emphasis on the industrial research that had been undertaken 7 years ago, the effects of R&D were very (statistically) significant and relatively high, thereby suggesting that the life of R&D (on average) tends to be long. The results however, vary across organizations depending on both firm size and the technological opportunities that a company faces. It appears that the depreciation rate of R&D investments is higher in the case of technologically sophisticated firms. In contrast, strategic investments in industrial research generate a relatively constant effect on the performance of other firms, supporting the notion that the corresponding returns for such firms decay slowly.
Keywords: Research and development (R&D); innovation; performance; time lag
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: 1: Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK 2: Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Publication date: 01 June 2008
- Editorial Board
- Information for Authors
- Subscribe to this Title
- Ingenta Connect is not responsible for the content or availability of external websites
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content