A paper I co-authored with Declan Jordan on European income inequality which was published in the Journal of Economic Studies has just appeared on RePEc. It can be accessed here.

Myself, Declan Jordan and Eoin O'Leary presented a paper on the "Effects of R&D Spending on Innovation by Irish and Foreign-owned Businesses" to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland on the 1st of November 2012.  The slides (which were presented by Eoin) can be viewed below.  A copy of the paper can be accessed here.  The paper will be appearing in the next issue of the Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland.  

I have just had an article published in the European Journal of Innovation Management.  It can be accessed from here.  The article poses the question that the introduction of numerous types of innovation simultaneously has a greater benefit for the firm that the introduction of these types of innovation in isolation.  The abstract and title are below:

Are Differing Forms of Innovation Complements or Substitutes? 

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical analysis of whether differing forms of innovation act as complements or substitutes in Irish firms’ production functions.
Design/methodology/approach – The approach adopted by this paper is empirical in nature. Data are obtained for approximately 582 firms from the Irish Community Innovation Survey 2004-2006. In total, four forms of innovation activity are identified: new to firm product, new to market product, process and organisational innovation. Formal tests for complementarity and substitutability are applied to these types of innovation to assess whether they have a complementary effect on firms’ turnover.
Findings – The results suggest that there is a substantial degree of complementarity among different forms of innovation. Out of six possible innovation combinations, three are complementary while none exhibits signs of substitutability.
Social implications – From a business perspective, the importance of organisational change to facilitate technological innovation is highlighted, while from a policy perspective the importance of the incentivisation of organisation and process innovation is also highlighted.
Originality/value – To date, most research has focused on the impact of various forms of innovation, in isolation, on firms’ productivity. They do not consider whether these forms of innovation may in fact be linked, and that by implementing two or more innovations simultaneously, the combined benefits may be greater than the sum of the parts.

My latest article has just appeared in Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. It is a co-authored article with Dr. Eoin O'Leary and Dr. Declen Jordan (both also in the School of Economics in UCC).  The article focuses on the impact of proximate and distant interaction on the likelihood of firms innovating while also taking account of the frequency with which firms interact.  The article can be downloaded from here.  The abstract is given below:

The effects of the frequency of spatially proximate and distant interaction on innovation by Irish SMEs

Abstract: This paper tests whether more frequent interaction at different spatial levels has a positive effect on the innovation performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the South-West and South-East of Ireland. Based on an original survey, it finds that more frequent interaction generally increases innovation likelihood, but at a diminishing rate, thus suggesting a trade-off between resources dedicated to transforming knowledge into new products and processes. Spatially distant interaction is found to be at least as valuable as proximate interaction, which questions the received wisdom that the best sources of knowledge are regional. Given the value of distant interaction, the results indicate that regional lock-in may be an obstacle to superior innovation performance of SMEs.