How do different crises impact the pattern of innovation and why does it matter?  The RelinC project joined a growing literature to better appreciate how the innovation activities of enterprises might adapt to improve resilience during crisis. Applied to the COVID19 pandemic in Norway, the RelinC project exploited a wide range of unique data sources:

• To assess the capability of the Norwegian economy to respond to a crisis in real time.
• To analyze how the innovation capacity of Norwegian firms adapts during crisis individually and collectively (in terms of ‘patterns of innovation’).

This project report provides a brief overview of the project while synthesizing some of its findings.  Morgenbladet referred to and discussed the project and some of its findings .

Project Team:

• NIFU:
  • Original idea and design of Marco Capasso (who left NIFU before the end of the project)
  • Eric Iversen, Michael Mark, Espen Solberg, Tore Sandven, Mark Knell

• Statistics Norway:

• • Marina Rybalka
  • Erik Fjærli
• Institutional partners:
  • Innovasjon Norge
  • Abelia

The synthesis builds on a set of intermediate activities that the project pursued to achieve its end:

•  It reviewed the relevant (post-Schumpeterian economics) literature;
•  It refined a standard taxonomy of firm-level innovation activity from this literature to better understand how economic crisis affect different types of innovative firms
•  and it explored and further developed real-time empirical strategies that might be useful to monitor and analyze a pandemic crisis and its consequences

The interested reader can find more information about the intermediate steps using the links above (to be updated)).

Presentations from NIFU-seminar February 28: How do economic shocks impact innovation and why does it matter?

• How do (economic) crisis impact the pattern of innovation and why does it matter? (Eric J. Iversen)
• Innovation and the wealth of nations in good and bad times (Daniele Archibugi)
• Session 1: Project Design & Results (Eric J. Iversen)
• Session 1: IPRs and the changing patterns of innovation during crisis (Eric J. Iversen)
• Innovation approaches and resilience to crisis (Michael S. Mark)
• Identifying resilient companies in times of crisis (Erik Fjærli)
• Conversation and questions with Daniele Archibugi, lead by Per Koch
• Forsknings- og innovasjonspolitikk i krisetider (paneldebatt)