Innovation and University-Firm R&D Collaboration in the European Food and Drink Industry

In National Innovation Systems (NIS), knowledge is generally understood to be produced and accumulated through an interactive innovation process that is embedded in a national context which in turn may help determine propensity for innovation. This paper aims to verify how product and process innovation in the European food and drink industry are affected by: i) NIS structure ii) NIS output in terms of WoS indexed publications and the supply of graduates iii) NIS fragmentation and coordination and iv) NIS scientific impact and specialisation. The main source of data on innovation by firms is the EU-EFIGE/Bruegel-UniCredit dataset. This is supplemented by information from the International Handbook of Universities, Eurostat and the bibliometric analysis of academic research output. The results obtained suggest that large research institutions in the public sector may well be detrimental to interaction between university and industry and that the indicators used for public research assessment are not necessarily the most appropriate proxies of local knowledge spillovers.