I am pleased to share a new paper, co-authored with Saverio Barabuffi, Valentina Cucino and Andrea Piccaluga, recently published in Small Business Economics: “On and off the podium: long-term impact evaluation of European R&D Grants on patenting performance.”

While we remain firm believers in the power of innovation policy to drive growth, we also maintain that rigorous impact evaluation is essential to understand its true effectiveness. In our latest study, we examined this dynamic by comparing companies that received public grant funding against a control group of non-funded applicants.

Our findings reveal an insightful contrast. In the immediate aftermath of receiving a grant, funded firms indeed ramp up their patenting activity and deepen their focus on existing technological capabilities. However, over a longer horizon, this initial edge diminishes. When compared to their non-funded peers, funded companies demonstrate no sustained advantage in producing truly novel patents or expanding into entirely new technological domains. This underscores why continuous, data-driven evaluation must go hand-in-hand with policy design.