Abstract:

The discussion on the subject of economic development and growth is always timely. The sustainable wealth creation, leading to the improvement of quality and economic level of our life was and will always be a national target. In this target, especially in the nowadays globalizing economic environment, innovation and knowledge creation play a very important role. Both of them are primary sources of economic growth, placed at the core of economic activity. The paper examines the patterns of innovation and knowledge creation in Greece, using patent information and in particular patents granted by the Greek Organization of Industrial Property. Based on the theoretical and empirical argument that economic and innovation activity are concentrated and that technology, innovation and knowledge creation are crucial factors for this concentration, the paper examines the Greek case. Patents express one way of describing, measuring and approaching technology- innovation and knowledge creation, as they are the main and formal product- result of R&D activities inside firms, but not only. Especially however at the firm level, firms develop patents in order to make profits and patents are indicative of the forthcoming new products and procedures that will be introduced in the market. So, using patent data, as a proxy and indicator of technology- innovation activity, we describe the Greek case presenting, as a first step, distributions of national origin, ownership structure (institutional status) and international patent classification. Our analysis shows that there is a high share of patents granted to Greek individuals and foreign- owned firms, while the involvement of Greek firms is very low. The paper is divided into four sections. Section one presents a small introduction and deals with methodology issues, also referring to some arguments for and against the use of patent data and statistics in the study of technology- innovation generation and knowledge creation. In section two we present the overall pattern of the patent activity in Greece and in section three the technological dimension of both Greek and foreign patents. Finally section four synthesizes, discusses the main findings, and presents some concluding remarks.