Measuring innovation activities in services: conceptual issues and methodology
The necessity to carry out a systematic data collection on innovation activities in the service sector is nowadays widely recognised. International statistical organisations, such as OECD and EUROSTAT as well as national statistical offices, have only recently started to move the first steps in the direction of improving definitions, classifications and the statistical procedures for the collection of reliable and comparable data on technology and innovation in the service sector (EUROSTAT, 1995
Relevance of innovation in the service sector
Table 1Table 2 show for the service sector as a whole, for the main firm size classes and service industries, the number of firms covered by the survey and the percentage of them which have introduced at least one technological innovation in the period 1993–1995.5 The figures on services presented in these and the following tables are those
Conclusions
The results of the Italian survey in the service sector provide a first empirical evidence on a variety of aspects of innovation activities in services and allow to highlight major similarities and differences with technological change in manufacturing. The most relevant results of this paper can be summarised as follows.
Technological innovation is quite a diffused phenomenon in market services: just less than one third (31.1%) of market service firms have introduced technological innovations
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Mario Pianta and Daniele Archibugi for comments and Maria Savona for her help in the elaboration of data and preparation of the statistical material. This research has been partly funded by the European Commission through the IDEA Project of the `Targeted Socio-Economic Research’.