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Introduction
Among 126 countries, according to the Global Innovation Index (Cornell University, INSEAD, and WIPO, 2018), Ecuador is in the 97th position. Having this in mind, our aims in this paper are threefold. First, we want to understand which are the drivers of innovation activities in Ecuadorian manufacturing firms. We consider in this paper a broad definition of innovation outputs that considers the four types in the Oslo Manual (OECD/Eurostat, 2005). Hence, we include product, process, organizational and marketing innovations. Second, we want to check whether the firms’ decision to innovate is mainly driven by the same factors independently of the innovation type (as it happened, for instance, in Schmidt and Rammer, 2007, for German firms). Finally, since we detect in the data that there is less innovation of any type (with the exception of organizational innovation) in the second wave of the Ecuadorian innovation survey than in the first wave, we want to find out which are the innovation drivers that get worse from one period to the next in order to understand these time patterns for innovation in manufacturing firms.
To provide answers for our research questions, we use the currently available two non-overlapping waves of the Ecuadorian National Innovation Activities Survey 2013 and 2015 (NIAS). In order to identify the determinants of the different types of innovations and test whether the decisions to innovate are correlated among them, we estimate a tetravariate probit model.
Summarizing our main results in the paper as regards the three particular aims before mentioned, they are the following. First, as for the general drivers of innovation activities in Ecuadorian manufacturing firms, we obtain that several factors encourage innovation: good firms’ demand conditions, better financial prospects and information on public support programs, competitive pressure, appropriability instruments with some information disclosure that facilitate spillovers, human capital, R&D effort (mainly on internal R&D), investment in capital goods, ICT related technologies and investments, and a minimum size of the firm (since firms with less than 50 employees are the less likely to innovate).
One relevant result from the paper about investments in innovation such as in R&D and in capital goods (machinery and equipment) is that for Ecuadorian firms there seems to be very relevant the acquisition of incorporated technology in...