The Evaluation of 'Behavioural Additionality' - IWT

CHAPTER 2 > Measuring Additionality of R&D Subsidies with Surveys:
Towards an Evaluation Methodology for IWT-Flanders
IWT-STUDIES > >> 48
Figure 1 >
Segmentation of the target population
I
SMEs
No Permanent R&D
Bottom quartile IWT
IV
SMEs
Permanent R&D
Top quartile IWT
II
Large Firms
Max 10 FTE R&D
No Permanent R&D
Bottom quartile IWT
III
Large Firms
Min 10 FTE R&D
Permanent R&D
Top quartile IWT
activities, which only perform R&D at an
irregular or low-level basis. The main driver
for innovation in their industry is not technology.
Among them, we find the companies
in the fast moving consumer goods
where market research instead of technology
has traditionally been the main driver.
However, sometimes these companies
undertake R&D projects in order to standardize
their production process or to gain
market share, e.g. through changes in
packaging. If one looks at the statistics
about gazelle companies, then you would
find that the fastest growing companies
mostly belong to this group. Group III contains
the large companies for which the
driver of growth and sustainable competitive
advantage is technology. By definition,
they have large R&D departments. They are
the companies we tend to find in the top
rankings of R&D intensity. Group IV contains
the SMEs, which have permanent R&D
activities going on. They are often known
as high tech start-ups or new technology
based firms.
Because each of these groups differ in number
of companies included and number of
projects performed at the IWT, we decided
not to use an ad random selection of companies.
This would result in an overrepresentation
of SMEs, which outnumber by far
the large firms. Therefore, we have chosen
to select specific companies in each of the
different segments. If our hypothesis is
right that companies with different profiles
experience different forms of additionality,
then it was – at this exploratory stage –
important that we included companies in
our sample, which were as heterogeneous
as possible. As outlined above, one of the
important aims of this project was to formulate
a set of questions, which captured
different forms of additionality outcomes.
Therefore, we selected companies, which
were situated in the top and bottom quartiles
of the four groups. Doing so, we
hoped to provoke in the interviews as many
different forms of additionality as possible.
In practice, our selection meant for
instance that in the group of SMEs with
permanent R&D activities, we selected only
those that were in the top quartile of companies
in terms of having projects running
at the IWT.
Figure 1 shows the criteria used to select
companies in each of the boxes. We started
from the list of all IWT clients as a sample
frame to approach the population. This list
was compared with the sample frame of all
companies that responded to the 1998 and
2000 R&D survey. The companies to be
included in the research were selected
based upon three criterions: first, the fact
whether they were officially considered as
an SME or not (based upon the European
definition). Second, their R&D activities and
finally, the number of R&D projects within
these companies that had been sponsored
by the IWT. As mentioned before, in order
to have clear-cut cases, we selected always
companies that were in the upper quartile
of subsidies in numbers of R&D projects and
those that were in the bottom quartile. The
companies selected for the test interviews
were well spread among the four groups of
IWT clients. Only the group of SMEs without
permanent R&D activities was slightly
larger than the other groups. However, also
in the sample frame of IWT clients this
appears to be the largest group.
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