How innovative are services? an empirical analysis for Spain

Abstract

The relevance of innovation as an engine of economic growth has never been denied, but the main emphasis has typically been placed on the manufacturing sector. A key step in this direction is the carrying out of innovation surveys that include the tertiary sector. Along these lines, the aim of this article is to provide evidence about the innovative character of services in Spain. Drawing on the Third Community Innovation Survey (CIS 3) for Spain, we use factor and cluster analyses to demonstrate that services do innovate, and to locate these activities in the production system.

Notes

Sundbo and Gallouj [2000] and Gallouj [2002b] propose a similar taxonomy, differentiating three perspectives: ‘technologist’, based on the introduction of equipment and on technological systems, usually at the expense of ignoring non-technological innovations and those innovations carried out by the service firms; ‘service-oriented’, that studies non-technological innovation, taking the ‘pure’ services as main domain (those services whose characteristics of intangibility and co-production are more evident); and ‘integrative’, based on the fact that the frontier between products and services is less and less clear-cut.

The application of factor analysis is justified by different indicators: correlation matrix, anti-image correlation matrix, MSA indices, Barlett test and KMO statistic (the latter shows a value of 0.767).