MODELS OF DEPENDENCIES IN INNOVATION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

Innovation has become one of the main strategic issues for all industries worldwide, as it is an imperative element for the development of any business. Factors, such as labour and financial mobility, as well as registered research and development expenditure in different fields, have contributed significantly in recent years to the expansion of innovations, emphasizing the importance of several domains for innovation creation. By using panel regression models we analyzed the impact of six economic factors, such as job-to-job mobility, employment in knowledge-intensive activities and research and development by sectors of performance, on the dependent variable, namely European patent applications to the European Patent Office by priority year in order to estimate the association of these independent factors with the variable measuring the innovation degree at the level of the European Union for the period 2009-2015. The regression revealed the significant relationship of more independent variables, such as the research and development by sectors of performance, the job-to-job mobility in knowledge-intensive activities, as well as venture capital investments on the dependent variable, namely the European patent applications to the European Patent Office, underlying their significance in the development of the latter one. Innovation has been mostly approached from a theoretical point of view in the scientific literature so far and less from a statistical point of view, where the relationship of measurable indicators of innovation and potential contributing factors were analyzed The present paper analyses panel regressions models of six economic factors, as mentioned, on innovation measured through the variable European patent applications to the European Patent Office, which have not been previously explored in other papers.