Innovation As a Factor of Changing the Productivity of Enterprises: Measurement and Interpretation Issues

Abstract

The purpose of this аrticle is to present the current state of empirical research in the field of assessing the impact of innovations on enterprise productivity, detailing the problems of statistical measurement of innovations and meaningful interpretation of accumulated results. To study a sample of scientific papers devoted to the quantitative analysis of the impact of innovations on productivity, the methods of multifactorial systematization, critical analysis, content analysis and synthetic generalization were used. The problems of statistical measurement and consistent interpretation are analyzed in the context of four levels: innovation as an economic phenomenon; innovation as a factor of productivity change in the economy of a particular country; innovation as a factor of comparative economic dynamics in the global scale and innovation as a factor of industrial development in Russia. Conclusions and Relevance. In the modern economy, innovations are an independent factor of production, different from scientific research, patented inventions, material and technical base and other factors. The impact of innovations is often insignificant against the background of other factors and (or) negative. Microeconomic studies carried out on the basis of the results of surveys of enterprises are strongly limited in terms of regional, sectoral and intertemporal coverage of the economy. The dominance of the subjective approach to measuring innovation and the CDM model to assess the relationship between innovation and productivity leads to the accumulation of less informative results. The analytical potential of mainstream approaches to the problem of assessing the impact of innovations on productivity is wearing out and it will not be possible to compensate for their weaknesses without losing comparability in the near future