Objective
'Corporate governance' is here understood as the system by which companies are controlled, directed and made accountable to shareholders and other stakeholders; 'control' is understood as including indirect influences of financial markets. This project will investigate the impact of corporate governance factors on the process of product innovation, and its outcomes, in established European companies.
Its objectives are:
- to explore what corporate governance regimes are highly conducive to successful product innovation in the specific circumstances of each firm, sector and country;
- to understand what legal and other measures at national and EU level are appropriate to encourage the development - or continuation - of such regimes, and which should be avoided and;
- to show company management, shareholders and other stakeholders what they can do to help develop a corporate governance regime suitable to their circumstances. The study will be comparative by country (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK) and by sector, and is based firmly on the past and present experience of the applicants. It is expected that it will be linked with parallel studies in Japan, Korea, the United States, Canada and Australia (countries all involved in a prior project).
It will proceed by:
- exploring, for a number of industries and firms in each participating country the various factors which make up the corporate governance regime, and the pressures which they put upon firms' top managers;
- assessing the performance in product innovation of the firms and industries selected in each participating country, in terms of all available performance data;
- investigating, through questionnaires and case studies, the effects of the corporate governance regime, and the pressures which it imposes, on the processes of product innovation - its conduct and the resources devoted to it. Information and communication technology, a sector of particular European weakness vis-a-vis the US and Japan, will be included.
The policy implications will extend to other countries besides those studied: all the 'excluded' EU countries (including Greece, Portugal and Spain) are sufficiently similar to at least one of the 'included' countries, in management culture, industrial structure, and legal system, for them to be relevant. Thus, the proposal addresses TSER research tasks I.I and I.2: national capabilities in S/T and innovation, and sectoral innovation systems and the shaping of technology. The aim of the study is to enable managers, institutional investors, and policymakers to take steps to improve national and European performance in product innovation in the high and medium technology industries, which are crucial to competitiveness now and in the future. Product innovation in these areas is, and will remain, the main net generator of employment and economic growth across the EU.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social sciencessociologygovernance
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementemployment
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
S10 1FL Sheffield
United Kingdom