INCENTIM

INCENTIM is a Research Division of K.U.Leuven R&D, and is part of the Department of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation (MSI), Faculty of Business and Economics, K.U. Leuven.

Research and teaching at the department span the domains of managerial economics, industrial organization, international business, innovation economics and management, political economy, and entrepreneurship. Major research topics include: the effects of market integration on corporate strategies, competition versus cooperation in strategic R&D investments, management of innovation in global firms and the internationalization of R&D, university-industry collaboration and the relationship with innovative performance, the economics of science, political business strategies and business-government relations. The department involves 11 faculty members and more than 20 doctoral students, teaching assistants and research assistants. The department has produced a large set of publications in international leading academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Research Policy and Journal of International Business Studies. The department has been active in major contract research projects coordinated by the European Commission, the OECD, the World Bank, and the Flemish and Federal Science Policy Units.

INCENTIM was founded in 1998 originating from the MSI department (Chair: Prof. K. Debackere). It specializes in the following areas: Innovation Management, Science and Technology Policy Studies and Knowledge-Intensive Entrepreneurship. Since 2001, Prof. Bart Van Looy is responsible for the daily operations of the division. INCENTIM has extensive experience in the implementation of text mining techniques on patent and publication data for domain alienation, science-technology linkages, and trends and emerging field analysis. It has been involved in various research projects for the Flemish government (AWI), Belgian government (DWTC) and European Commission (DG Research). Together with the Steunpunt R&D Statistics, a policy research institute supporting Flemish research, development and innovation policy, INCENTIM developed and implemented an integrated patent database and indicator infrastructure based on EPO, USPTO and DERWENT patent data (and later on PATSTAT).

The INCENTIM team acted as methodological experts for the PATSTAT Taskforce to arrive at harmonized patent statistics. They recently contributed to the development of a sector allocation methodology which allows identifying university-owned patents and an approach to harmonize patent assignee names (3). In particular, the availability of an exhaustive methodology to characterize the sector of activity of applicants (including universities) is highly relevant for this project. INCENTIM is currently developing and applying methodological guidelines to arrive at regional allocation of patent activity (EU-27, Nuts 2, 3) (4). Results of this latter effort will become available from March 2009 onwards and might be instrumental for this project.

INCENTIMs engagement in this research project is enabled by the presence of The Policy Research Centre for R&D Indicators (Steunpunt O&O Indicatoren, SOOI), a research centre of MSI dedicated to the development of RDTI indicators and research based on these indicators. Steunpunt started in January 2002 and funding by the Flemish Government has recently been extended until 2012. It provides the Flemish Government with up to date relevant statistical data on innovation including publications, patents, R&D and innovation expenditures and output.