ABSTRACT
Knowledge intensity in industrialised economies has been growing since the Second World War. R&D expenditures have been expanding at a very high pace and the R&D function has become internalised in most large firms (Freeman 1982). This phenomenon has caught the attention of economists and students of technological change (Freeman 1982; Coombs et al. 1987; Stoneman 1983), but the problem has often been analysed by comparing the different R&D intensities of, for example, different firms or countries to establish whether higher R&D intensity has led to greater innovativeness. Recently, however, increased attention has been paid to the processes of knowledge creation and utilisation (Dasgupta and David 1992; Foray 1991; David and Foray 1994).
