certain agreements between signatory countries). In order to avoid counting them several times, statisticians have defined an indicator called a “patent family” which designates a set of patents filed in several countries to protect the same invention. We distinguish, for example, triadic “patent families”, which are a set of patents filed with three of the main offices, namely the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Innovation indicators are not limited to these two; they also include the number of researchers, scientific publications, amounts devoted to financing innovative firms (venture capital), registrations of other intellectual property titles (trademarks, designs), revenue generated by innovative firms, diffusion of key technologies, etc. A better understanding of the innovation process leads not to limiting research to traditional indicators but to refining the evaluation of innovation efforts and performance by using other indicators. For example, at the firm level, statisticians (see OECD 2019) seek to better measure intangible investments that are not R&D (such as software and databases), or the interactions that firms develop with other firms or institutions. At the country level, indicator scoreboard and summary indicators are being developed to quantify innovation.
In Europe, the European Union Innovation Scoreboard (created in 2001) provides a synthetic indicator for ranking countries according to their innovation performance. Four categories of countries are defined: modest innovators, moderate innovators, notable innovators and innovation champions. The results for 2019 were as follows.
Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands appeared to be the leaders in innovation, positioning themselves well above the European average. Notable innovators included the following countries: Luxembourg, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Ireland, France and Estonia. Their results were slightly above (or close to) the European average. The performance of moderate innovators was between 50% and 90% of the European average. This category included many countries in Eastern and Southern Europe, such as Portugal, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Cyprus, Malta, Italy, Spain, Greece, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Latvia, Poland and Croatia. Finally, the modest innovators, Romania and Bulgaria, had a performance below 50% of the European average.
This synthetic indicator – the Summary Innovation Index – is based on four broad categories of indicators and 10 dimensions of innovation. The “framework conditions” take into account the essential factors of innovation performance, and this category includes human resources, the attractiveness of the research system and the environment conducive to innovation. “Investments” measures public and private investment in innovation. “Innovation activities” seeks to measure the efforts made by firms, distinguishing between the characteristics of innovators, networks and intellectual assets. Finally, the “Impacts” category considers impacts on employment and sales. In total, the composite indicator is constructed from 27 indicators.
Figure 1.1. Member countries' innovation performance (source: European Innovation Scoreboard 2019). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/uzunidis/innovation1.zip
Such an indicator makes it possible to monitor the performance of the European Union and of each country over time, as well as serves as a guide for the definition of public policies adapted to the specific problems encountered in each country. One notable result is that the countries that champion innovation show similar performance in each dimension of innovation measured. This leads to a view that the overall strength of the national innovation system plays a key role in innovation performance (see section 1.5).
1.4. From the entrepreneur to the multiple actors of innovation
While Schumpeter was the first economist to develop an innovation theory, he also designated the entrepreneur as the economic agent who achieves “new combinations of production factors” (Boutillier and Uzunidis 2016). Entrepreneurial economics certainly did not begin with Schumpeter. As early as the 18th century, the entrepreneur was already attracting the attention of economists, but more to emphasize their ability to take commercial risks (the merchant) than to design and manufacture new products (the industrialist) (Cantillon 1755). The figure of the “projector” was generally devalued because his extravagant projects ran the risk of a general crisis, harmful to all, according to A. Smith (1759, 1776).
As pointed out above, technical progress did not appear in the 18th century. It is a permanent feature of human societies. During the 18th century, however, a twofold evolution can be observed. On the one hand, technical progress is intrinsically linked to the market and gives rise either to the production of new consumer goods intended for the final consumer or to the production of machines for companies that automate production processes. On the other hand, there is a separation between science and technology. This evolution is evident in Say’s (1803) definition of the entrepreneur as the intermediary between the scientist who produces knowledge and the worker who applies it to industry. The entrepreneur thus creates markets, wealth and jobs.
Whereas until the 18th century, the entrepreneur was essentially a merchant and, in this sense, could be dependent on a difference between sale and purchase prices (Landes et al. 2010). In the 19th century, the entrepreneur became an industrialist. Until this period, the field of technology was rather that of the craftsman (Zilsel 1942). This evolution did not take place without resistance nor social and political conflicts; machines were then qualified as job killers (Jarrige 2009). However, while many craftsmen disappeared, caught up in the big businesses that reduced them to the precarious condition of factory workers, others became entrepreneurs and created industrial empires, via the development of new technologies (electricity, mechanics, automobiles, telecommunications, aviation, etc.) (Perrin 2017).
The managerial company model (separation between ownership and management of capital) became a norm by the end of the 19th century, mainly in the United States and then in Western Europe. Schumpeter (2008), an attentive reader of Marx, detected in this evolution a major change in capitalism, which was becoming bureaucratized (see section 13.2). This observed disappearance of the entrepreneur marks the continuation of a process of division of labor between the manager (who manages the firm) and the shareholder (who finances it through the shares they buy). The entrepreneur, the driving force of the first Industrial Revolution, disappears to the benefit of a new institution, the managerial company.
In the years following the end of World War II, during the period of reconstruction, the economies of industrialized countries underwent an unprecedented transformation (Dockès 2020), taking advantage of new technologies and heavy investments developed during the war (automobiles, aviation, chemicals, nuclear, digital, IT, etc.). The entrepreneur was then seen as an endangered species, with the future belonging to the “technostructure” (Galbraith 1967) thanks to the “visible hand of managers” (Chandler 1977). This period of strong growth was based on the partnership between the large company and the labor society. The State then played a central role in financing scientific research and planning the economy, contributing to the development of managerial firms in highly capital-intensive sectors (steel, telecommunications, transport, energy, petrochemicals, etc.) (see section 13.5). The time had come for mass production and consumption. Gradually, this model was seized, leading to the “great turnaround” of the 1970s (Dockès 2020).
Big corporations entered a crisis period; the markets created by the innovations of the post-World War II period were saturated. Unemployment was rising sharply in the industrial countries. Large companies no longer generated enough jobs, and even drastically reduced their workforce in order to reduce their costs. From the end of the 1970s onwards, the creation of companies appeared as a means of public policy to reduce unemployment whatever the job seeker’s profile (women, young people, elderly people, immigrants, non-qualified people, etc.). The creation of a company then became a kind of injunction to designate this process of socio-economic transformation. Bringing the Schumpeterian entrepreneurial theory up to date, the injunction is not only about job creation (and first and foremost that of the entrepreneur), but also about innovation, which