Impact of Swiss technology policy on firm innovation performance: an evaluation based on a matching approach

This paper investigates the impact of the promotional activities of the Swiss Commission of Technology and Innovation (CTI) on the innovation performance of the supported firms based on a matched-pairs analysis of 199 firms supported by the CTI in the period 2000-2002. CTI's promotional activities significantly improved the innovation performance of the firms that they supported with respect to six different measures of innovation performance. This could be shown by four different matching methods. A further finding was that the magnitude of the impact correlated positively with the relative size of the financial support, as measured by the quotient of the volume of financial support to the volume of a supported firm's own research and development expenditures.