Varieties of european national innovation systems

This paper provides a novel, empirically grounded map of National Innovation Systems (NIS) in Europe, based on a unique micro level analysis across several EU countries. By focusing on the Eurostat Community Innovation Survey 2014 (CIS2014) micro-aggregated data, we perform an exploratory factor analysis to provide a micro-level grounding to the multi-faceted components of NIS. We relate the structure, innovation strategies and performance of the firm to relevant institutional characteristics of the NIS in which it is embedded, including the nature of public sector support (e.g. cooperation and procurement) and the characteristics of the public-private links (e.g. with universities, foreign institutions and/or other firms), amongst others. We then redesign the map of the European technology ‘clubs’ by means of a cluster analysis based on our factors/NIS dimensions. Our findings ground the diagnostics of the European NIS, add to the most recent literature on NIS by taking into account the micro–level sources of the European NIS ‘clubs’, and complement the historical picture provided by Cirillo et al. (2016a).