Franziska Bay (p), Sierdjan Koster

Maximilian Benner

Now more than ever - with the drastic change in working conditions during the pandemic – the importance of an individual’s job satisfaction for their subjective well-being should not be disregarded. After all, inequalities in job satisfaction could be an indication for inequalities in subjective wellbeing. On average, in many studies, self-employed individuals are found to achieve a higher job satisfaction than their wage-employed peers. Many see the reason for this in the increased independence and autonomy experienced by entrepreneurs. This paper argues that entrepreneurs might also intentionally seek out their job to actively shape the business and their role in it to achieve a good job-skills match. As good job matches have been shown to lead to higher job satisfaction, they might offer a possible alternative explanation to why the self-employed experience higher job satisfaction than the wage-employed.
This is investigated using the Dutch dataset of the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills, an international panel study that assesses job-related competencies. A subsample of 3,200 participants, which contains individuals between the ages of 15 and 65 who have been employed or self-employed in 2011 and 2012, is used to compare the job match quality and reported job satisfaction of self-employed vs wage-employed. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze group mean differences. The expected finding is that individuals who transition into self-employment are able to achieve a better-quality job match and this reach higher levels of job satisfaction. Control variables are observed numeracy, literacy and problem-solving skills, the individual’s residential location, gender and level of education.
Overall, this study contributes to the literature by offering another explanation of why the self-employed report higher levels of job satisfaction than wage-employed individuals while making use of actual skill measurements collected via the OECD survey.

Anna Varga-Csajkás, Manfred Paier (p)

Franziska Bay

This study addresses the issue of knowledge creation in a less favored region where the university sector is relatively strong, but the related industry is left behind. The EU´s Smart Specialization Strategy (S3) aims at strengthening the innovation capacity and competitiveness of structurally disadvantaged regions. However, political decisions on local or regional priorities often lack a sound scientific basis provided by economic modeling. In this research, we focus on the Pécs city region in southern Hungary. Here, an S3 strategy is being implemented and cutting-edge technologies including industrial biotechnology are one of the eight national priority areas. The region of Pécs is considered a knowledge region, where strengthening the university-centric innovation ecosystem is a policy objective. In this region, the university has outstanding educational and research activities in the field of biotechnology, but the related industry is still underdeveloped.
We build an empirically guided agent-based model (ABM) of new regional knowledge creation to explore different policies with scenario simulations. Focusing explicitly on the knowledge flows between the scientific and industrial domains, this kind of model can demonstrate how the actions and interactions of heterogeneous agents lead to the emergence of complex phenomena like new pathway creation. This ABM describes how the actors of the biotech innovation system individually and jointly create new knowledge while they are embedded in their regional and region-external context. Compared to previous models of knowledge creation in the biotech sector, it provides a balanced level of detail for the university and the industry sectors focusing on the links between scientific and technological knowledge. The agents – industry firm agents and university institute agents – have individual characteristics, are enacted to engage in independent as well as collaborative research, hereby changing their knowledge profiles and innovation outputs, and giving rise to innovation pathways at the system-level.
To underpin the model with empirical data, different data sources are tapped. On the one hand, personal interviews were conducted with representatives of 14 biotech-related firms and 16 university institutes in Pécs to gain information for region-specific model features. On the other hand, we use patent data from PATSTAT, publication data from the Web of Science, and a recent ontology of industrial biotechnology for initialization, calibration, and validation of the model. We will apply the model to analyze S3 policy scenarios by showing how the prioritization of different fields of biotechnology would affect the dynamics of knowledge creation.

Jussi Heikkilä (p), Mirva Peltoniemi

Manfred Paier

Patents and other intellectual property rights (IPRs) are at the core of innovation studies. But who in practice drafts the applications and supports the applicants in the filing process? We conduct an exploratory case study to shed light on the dynamics of the IPR service sector. We focus on the sector’s evolution in Finland in 1990-2020, and analyse the impacts of globalization, European integration and digitalization. IPR register data and expert interviews suggest that the scale of services has increased, and the scope widened as national, regional, and global IPR institutions have become increasingly interconnected. Due to institutional changes triggered by European integration, the Finnish IPR service firms have shifted their services increasingly from the national patent office to EPO and EUIPO. Even though changes in IPR institutions aimed at reducing transaction costs have removed some sources of revenue from the IPR service firms, the increasing volume of international filings has counteracted that trend. We conclude with suggestions on how to include the role of IPR service providers to the study of IPR activity.

Maximilian Benner (p)

Jussi Heikkilä

The path development literature has recently sharpened its focus on the role of agency and institutions. However, this focus has tended to ignore differences between agentic and institutional processes that lead to different developments within a path. In particular, the question of inclusiveness has been largely ignored in the path development literature so far. The paper proposes a conceptual framework that combines concepts of path development, inclusive innovation, change and maintenance agency, and institutional change, and applies the framework to the case of Israel’s Arab population in Haifa and Nazareth. For decades, Israel’s path of high-technology entrepreneurship has been driven mainly the country’s secular Jewish majority. During recent years and supported by targeted innovation policies, a nascent scene of high-tech entrepreneurship has developed in the largely Arab city of Nazareth and spilled over to the ethnically mixed city of Haifa. Nevertheless, Arab entrepreneurship is not separate from the dominant path in the Jewish majority but is partly promoted by the same agents. The paper examines the interplay of agentic and institutional processes in driving this integration of a minority into a path and thus contributes to better understanding the causes and consequences of inclusive path development which can inform policy agendas also in European countries.