Analyses of Three Danish Innovation Programmes

The Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (DASTI) have had a number of impact analyses prepared, which enlighten the effects of selected innovation programmes.

The purpose of The Innovation Assistant Programme is to increase the competences of small and medium-sized companies on innovation and creative thinking by the employment of highly educated individuals. The analysis indicates that the enterprises increase their value added and profit, but that the results are subject to a significant statistical uncertainty and must therefore be interpreted with care. 

With The Industrial PhD Programme the student is both employed in a company and enrolled in a university over a period of three years. The analysis points that compared to regular university graduates the industrial PhDs earn 7-10 percent higher wages, and are more likely to be found at the top levels of their organisations’ hierarchies or in positions requiring high-level specialist knowledge. The companies see on average increasing patenting activity, positive developments in gross profit and employment growth, but growth in total factor productivity developments cannot be identified.

The Innovation Consortia are large scale innovation project collaborations between enterprises and public sector knowledge institutions. Based on 220 companies the analysis shows that companies, which have participated in an innovation consortium, increase growth in gross profit and employment. However, the result for employment growth is not robust to using the alternative control group, and should thus be interpreted as being more tentative.

The three analyses are so-called econometric impact analyses. Therefore the compendium also contains a manual, which formulates minimum analytical requirements and key performance indicator standards for evaluation of public research and innovation programmes. This provides greater knowledge and better guidance for this type of analyses and makes it possible to compare the impact of different innovation instruments.