Research note
Relative risk and innovation activities: the case of Greece
George Halkos
Associate Professor, Director of Postgraduate Studies, Department of Economics,
University of Thessaly, Greece
Christos Kitsos
Professor and Head of Department, Department of Mathematics, Technological Educational Institute of Athens, Greece
PP: 156 - 159
Abstract
In this paper we examine the innovative performance of Greek firms in terms of female participation in research and technological development. We rely on the final results of a research project on women in innovation, technology and science, based on 372 questionnaires selected on a two years time period (2004-2006). For this reason a number of variables are used, like the total number of women employees by age, education level, firm size and sector, as well as women in product and in process innovations. Other variable like their position in the firm (owner, manager), equality in job enrichment, salary, education-training and promotion are also considered. The collected variables are used in a generalized linear model formulation to evaluate the relative risk associated with them.
Keywords
innovation; entrepreneurship; competitiveness; product innovation; process innovation; relative risk
Article Text
In innovation management, the first explicit theory is the 'technology push theory or engineering theory of innovation', where basic research and industrial R&D are the sources of new or improved products and processes. Innovation refers to a new or significantly improved product introduced to the market. According to Dodgson (2001) innovation is about economically important novelty like new products and processes as well as scientific, technological, organizational and business and financial activities that produce them.\
In Greece there is not a clear development on innovation activities, although such a development would help the already problematic economical situation. To persuade SME to work with new technologies, technical feasibility is still considered as necessary condition for innovation but no longer sufficient for successful innovation (Schmookler, 1996; Myers and Marquis, 1969). Here is where a new generation called the 'chain-link theories' of innovation emerged in order to explain that linkages between knowledge and market are not as automatic as assumed in the technology push and the market pull theories of innovation (Von Hippel, 1994).
Brophey and Brown (2009) study firm- and innovation-specific practices in order to construct a picture of the most significant innovation practices within an enterprise. Bienkowska et al. (2010) discuss interactions and collaborations between public and private sector innovation while, among others, Potts (2009, 2010) recognizes that public sector organizations can benefit from greater attention to innovation in the effectiveness, scope and delivery of the services they provide.
The task of our paper is to analyse and discuss the existing framework, the factors determining and hampering innovation as well as the role of female entrepreneurship in the Greek firms. Our main target is to test a hypothesis about the explanatory power of female participation on firms' innovation activities. For this reason we employ the Generalized Linear Models (GLM) statistical framework, which is crucial in any Risk Analysis problem. In collecting primary data, we have used a questionnaire to several sectors in Greek enterprises. To our knowledge this is the first effort in Greece trying to estimate the relative risk of female involvement in entrepreneurship.
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