Daniel Nepelski

• PhD
• Team Leader at Joint Research Centre

Although firm characteristics play a crucial role in predicting future performance, public agencies often overlook these factors in their funding decisions, unlike Venture Capital investors. This oversight may have implications for the pay-offs from publicly allocated funds and the achievement of policy objectives. To explore the role of firm chara...

The European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs), established under the Digital Europe Programme, play a pivotal role in bolstering digitalisation across European businesses. There are 227 hubs, of which 151 are funded directly by the Digital Europe Programme. The EDIHs are widely distributed across 85% of European regions, covering almost 90% of the E...

This analysis compares the characteristics of firms supported by public and private sources in early-stage financing to investigate funding patterns for innovative companies. It examines whether the two sources of funding target similar firms in the period 2008-2017 using a portfolio approach on EU-based firms raising either Venture Capital financi...

This AI Watch report analyses AI uptake in manufacturing. It recognizes that AI can empower a variety of applications in the manufacturing sector and it can impact all stages of production; in particular a major role for AI lies in blending data from different processes, factory floors or production sites to enable holistic optimizations. However,...

This report provides estimates of AI investments in the EU between 2018 and 2020 and, for selected investments categories, in the UK and the US. It considers AI as a general-purpose technology and, besides direct investments in the development and adoption of AI technologies, also includes investments in complementary assets and capabilities such a...

European Commission Science for Policy Briefs

The EU Framework Programme (FP) has evolved from supporting pre-competitive research to cover the entire innovation value chain and became the world’s largest research and innovation (R&I) ecosystem. It facilitates the creation of R&I networks among organizations from around the world. To oversee and manage the innovation activities of complex coll...

This Science for Policy report addresses the technological and innovation challenges that the EU industry has to face during the next decade. The report focuses on the following themes: Technology diffusion and industrial dynamics; Innovation and company value chains; Financing innovation; Industrial innovation for transitions and transformation; E...

The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of the recent trends of Venture Capital (VC) market in the European Union. In particular, it investigates and documents the characteristics of VC transactions, Venture Capitalists, and VC-backed firms, in the context of European Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Indeed, in recent years,...

This report provides estimates of AI investments in EU27 in 2018 and for 2019. It considers AI as a general-purpose technology and, besides direct investments in the development and adoption of AI technologies, includes also investments in complementary assets and capabilities such as skills, data, product design and organisational capital among AI...

This report presents key findings of the Innovation Radar Project Coordinators Survey in European Framework Programme Research and Innovation projects, a purposeful sample of European Framework Programme (FP) Project Coordinators (PC). The objective is to identify the practices and activities of PCs leading EU FP projects and to understand their im...

In spite of a large interest in General Purpose Technologies, it is unclear how much economies invest in their development and diffusion. For example, various sources provide various figures of investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This constantly blurs the understanding of the AI-driven revolution among policy makers and business leaders an...

Although technological complexity seems to be a crucial determinant of economic development, it remains insufficiently explored. Relying on microinformation stored in individual patent applications and by applying the network view of countries linked to the technologies they develop, we create a global technology space and derive complexity measure...

Recognizing the fact that the support of the public sector of research and innovation lays the foundations for new technologies, industries and markets, this report presents the Market Creation Potential Indicator (MCPI) and applies it to the innovations coming out of the EC-funded FP research projects. This way, it contributes to the creation of a...

The report is downloaded from the European Commission DG JRC web site: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/digital-transformation-transport-construction-energy-government-and-public-administration This report provides an analysis of digital transformation (DT) in a selection of policy areas coverin...

Digital technologies have the potential to modernise the economy. But digital innovations are disruptive. Therefore, policies need to be comprehensive and go beyond the support of the ICT sector as well as address a variety of issues: increasing returns to the use of data, heterogeneity of the digital innovation actors and ecosystem, digital skills...

Public funding of research improves the systemic conditions of entrepreneurial ecosystems. It provides early-stage financing to technologies that form the basis for new products and services. In addition to financial support, instruments as the EC Framework Programmes (FP) facilitate the creation of research networks. By bringing together organisat...

The study explores how European SMEs applying to the SME Instrument (SMEi) funding scheme under Horizon 2020 innovate use the digital platform business model. The study demonstrates a widespread awareness of the digital platform concept as a tool to be applied to gain momentum and growth, taking advantage of the digital affordances. The main challe...

Entrepreneurship is a major driver of economic development as it provides the building blocks for job creation and innovation, leading to substantial improvement in human welfare. This dataset includes the 2016 edition of the Entrepreneurship and Scale-up Indices (ESIS) and its underlying sub-indicators taking into account a broad variety of framew...

Impact evaluations of collaborative research projects usually focus on private benefits of participants, e.g. their turnover or employment growth. We study the innovative performance of collaborative research projects and how it depends on the organizational diversity of participating organizations. Our population includes participants to EC-funded...

Innovation Radar identifies innovations and innovators in EU-funded research and innovation projects. To capture the different maturity levels of innovations towards commercialisation, four innovation categories have been created based on respective scores of the Innovation Management and Innovation Readiness Indicators: Optimisation, Creation, Com...

In this report we provide an assessment of the statistical methodology behind the Innovation Radar. In particular we analyse to what extent the Innovation potential index and the Innovator capacity index are analytically and statistically sound and transparent. The aim of this report is to evaluate to what extent variables that have been included i...

In 2015 the European Commission (EC) DG CNECT launched the 2nd edition of the Startup Europe (SE) initiative under the Horizon 2020 EU Research and Innovation programme. This initiative coordinated the efforts of six distinct projects (Digistart, Welcome, ePlus, Startup Scaleup, Twist and Startup Europe Partnership) that connected just as many Euro...

Digital technologies have changed the way we store, consume and create information and knowledge. At the aggregate level, the ease of knowledge distribution and creation in the digital economy, gave rise to new forms of innovating. Innovative activities are increasingly taking place in self-organizing networks. The outcomes of this type of form of...

The Innovation Radar (IR) is a European Commission (EC) initiative to identify high-potential innovations and innovators in EC-funded Framework Programme (FP) research and innovation projects and guide project consortia in terms of the appropriate steps to reach the market. This report presents the process and results of linking the IR data with th...

The present report discusses innovation challenges under the following headings: The 3% R&D target and industrial structure: is it still a relevant goal? if we cannot achieve the 3% target, does it make sense to keep it? Technology diffusion: how can we combat its sluggishness and speed up adoption? Access to finance: is the large amount of liquidi...

We look at the structure and evolution of an information and communication technology (ICT) global innovation network (GIN) by mapping the locations of R&D centres belonging to a group of multinational ICT enterprises. We found that the number of countries and connections have increased in a very short time, and that most of the newcomers have come...

High-tech entrepreneurship is one of the main means by which new knowledge and technologies are converted into economic and social benefits. This report analyses the levels and determinants of high-tech entrepreneurship across European countries. To this end, it uses country-level data on high- and low-tech total early-stage entrepreneurial activit...

This report attempts to summarise findings and conclusions of over 30 studies published within the EURIPIDIS project (European Innovation Policies for the Digital Shift). The objective of EURIPIDIS was to better understand how digital innovation and entrepreneurship work; to assess the EU's digital innovation and entrepreneurship performance; and t...

This report contributes to a better understanding of the framework conditions that are conducive to the emergence and the growth of entrepreneurial activities in Europe. It takes into account a broad variety of framework conditions, including entrepreneurial culture, access to human capital, support initiatives for knowledge creation and networking...

Effective management of organizational resources in big data initiatives is of growing importance. Although academic and popular literatures contain many examples of big data initiatives, very few are repeated in the same organization. This suggests either big data delivers benefits once only per organization or senior managers are reluctant to com...

Through the perspective of VC-backed companies, this report describes the main locations of start-up activity in Europe, i.e. start-up hotspots. It aims at providing evidence on start-up activity in Europe and at describing the European VC activity over the last two decades. The study reports the following: • Europe receives 15% of global VC invest...

The European Commission is trying to increase Europe's competitiveness by building on its assets, particularly its many ICT industrial clusters. The Commission is seeking to step up efforts in ICT R&D&I by strengthening the role of European ICT Poles of Excellence (EIPEs). But what are EIPEs? Where are they and what are their characteristics? This...

Developing countries are increasingly seen as competitors in knowledge intensive activities. However, their rapidly growing innovation potential suggests that they will become important producers of technology demanded by other countries, and at the same time, they will increase their demand for technology produced elsewhere. To study the evolution...

We study the global system of information and communication technology (ICT) research and development (R&D) locations at city level by applying network analysis and profiling R&D locations with respect to technological complexity. We analyse how the position of a city in the network interacts with the level of its technological complexity. The resu...

In this chapter network analysis is applied to study ICT R&D locations at the country level. A dataset on the location and R&D activity of over 3000 R&D centers belonging to 175 MNEs located in over 50 countries around the world is used to that end. The results show that most of the countries have few R&D connections and are grouped into ‘‘cliques”...

The internationalization of ICT R&D in Asia is analyzed and compared with other world regions. Despite the strong linkages between Japan, the U.S., and the EU, Asia seems to be very attractive as a location for R&D activities. The role of Japan as a partner of other Asian countries has decreased strikingly, mainly in favor of the U.S. While being a...

By using a novel framework, we assess India's attractiveness and potential as an international science and technology collaboration partner. Based on evidence from existing empirical studies, we identify four elements relevant as drivers of innovation collaboration, which we further use in our framework. These elements include inventive capacity, t...

We develop a framework for assessing innovation collaboration partners. Based on the studies explaining the internationalisation of inventive activity, we identify four elements relevant as drivers of innovation collaboration. These elements include inventive capacity, technological specialisation patterns, openness to international innovation coll...

Production and innovation activities are being re-distributed across the world. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are proving the major engine of global growth, being less impacted by the financial crisis than developed economies or able to recover more quickly. Asia in the Global ICT Innovation Network takes a close look at the...

In this paper we use the subset of ICT companies from the European R&D Investment Scoreboard to test the effect of change in the shareholders structure on the business orientation towards R&D. A change in one of the control participation for the business group is associated with a deepening of the R&D orientation. The effect is twice as large if th...

Global innovation networks are emerging as a result of the international division of innovation processes through, among others, international technological collaborations. At the aggregate level, the creation of technological collaboration between countries can be considered as mutually beneficial (or detrimental) and their random distribution is...

We analyse the internationalization of information and communications technology (ICT) research and development (R&D) in Asia and compare it with other world regions. Despite the strong linkages between Japan, the United States and the European Union, Asia seems to be very attractive as a location for R&D activities. It is also striking how the rol...

We apply network analysis to study the ICT R&D locations at the city level. We use a dataset on the location and R&D activity of over 3000 R&D centres belonging to 175 MNEs, located in over 1300 cities around the world. The results show that most of the cities have few R&D connections and are grouped into "cliques", linked through network hubs. Hen...

We develop a framework for assessing innovation collaboration partners. Based on the evidence from existing empirical studies, we identify four elements relevant as drivers of innovation collaboration. These elements include inventive capacity, technological specialization patterns, openness to international innovation collaboration and economic po...

We analyse the internationalisation of ICT R&D in Asia and compare it with the other world regions. Despite the strong linkages between Japan, the US and the EU, Asia seems to be very attractive as a location for R&D activities. It is also striking how the role of Japan as a partner of other Asian countries decreased mainly in favour of the US. At...

Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (IKT) sind der Antrieb des modernen Innovationsprozesses. Für besseres Verständnis dieser Dynamik, analysiert diese Dissertation die Wechselwirkungen zwischen Innovation und Wettbewerb. Die Arbeit umfasst zwei Teile: Erstens wird die Frage behandelt, wie die Märkte organisiert werden können, um das optim...

This paper examines how electronic procurement influences firms’ sourcing strategy. The relationship between the technology choice in a vertical structure is illustrated with respect to its impact on the coordination cost and the competition between suppliers. Hypotheses are tested using data from the e-Business W@tch survey. Assessing the relation...

Am Beispiel der IKT-Wirtschaft zeigt sich, dass junge Unternehmen stärker als etablierte dazu neigen, bei ihren Produkt- und Verfahrensinnovationen auch neue IKT-Lösungen zu entwickeln und anzuwenden. Start-ups der IKT-Wirtschaft spielen damit nicht nur eine wichtige Rolle für die technologische Entwicklung innerhalb ihrer eigenen Branche. Da es si...

It is no secret that open source software (OSS) is gaining ground, yet the drivers for OSS adoption still seem rather unclear. This report aims to compare various industries within select countries in the EU and tries to explain their OSS adoption patterns. The results indicate that companies in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are leading OS...

This paper examines how electronic procurement influences the organization of economic transactions. It seeks evidence for ICT-induced changes in how companies organize their activities and whether ICT lead to more competitive and transparent markets. Testing the relationship between the effect of electronic procurement on procurement cost and sour...

Open-Source-Software (OSS) setzt sich zunehmend durch, wobei Unternehmen aus Polen, der Tschechischen Republik und Ungarn eine Vorreiterrolle einnehmen.Die Beweggründe für den Einsatz von OSS anstelle sogenannter proprietärer Software sind noch nicht abschließend geklärt. Hier wird der Einsatz von OSS in verschiedenen Industriezweigen ausgewählter...

The paper analyses the adoption path of e-business technologies in the automotive industry. It has been showed that there is a profound and constantly increasing discrepancy in the diffusion of IT with respect to firm size. Large firms embarked on new technologies earlier and more intensive than SME's (small and medium-sized enterprises). The obser...

Industries are transformed by the adoption of flexible production technologies and complementary changes in firms' organization. Some of the results of this transformation include companies extending their product lines and reshaping their relationships with outside partners. In this paper I analyze how the structure of the upstream industry influe...

The reason for contradictory predictions of the models studying the impact of competi¬tion on innovation is the varying assumptions with respect to competition or innovation type. Thus, we study how the impact of competition changes with different types of innova¬tive Output. In particular, we distinguish between non-ICT - and ICT-enabled product a...