Determinants of Innovation and the Economic Growth of Innovators: Tracing the evolution of innovative firms over time

The idea of the project Dynamic Patterns of Innovative Activities among Finnish Firms was that looking at firms' history and development over time can reveal information about the innovative activities and the innovation potential of these firms. The project wanted to answer the question: How does history influence innovative activities and how does it point to successful innovation? This paper analyses the question: How does history point towards successful innovation? We focus on those firm-level determinants of innovation and economic growth that can be followed over years, i.e. innovative efforts described by firm-level R&D capital, R&D collaboration, patenting, business acquisitions and restructuring, and recruitment of highly-educated personnel. One of the targets of the project was to get more in-depth knowledge of what kinds of data sources the Database of Finnish Innovations (Sfinno Database) and the Community Innovation Surveys (CIS) conducted in Finland are when compared with each other. It follows from this target that the focus of this paper is on innovative firms that have launched one or more product innovations onto the market. Product innovations are covered more extensively than process innovations in the Sfinno Database.