Appropriation Instruments and Innovation Activities: Evidence from Tunisian Firms

This paper documents the relationship between appropriation instruments and the innovation activity in Tunisia. It focuses on the factors that determine the appropriation of innovation activities like the value of sales of the firms, networking, science–industry linkage, competitive pressure and demand pull. To this end, we suggest an econometric analysis of 586 Tunisian firms using simple and bivariate logit regressions. We find significant interaction effects between appropriability and R&D activity. The results confirm that patenting is primarily driven by firm-level factors, not by industry affiliation. Access to external knowledge and firm's specific characteristics are the most linked factors to the innovation protection. Firms that use appropriation instruments have a higher probability of investing in R&D than others. Indeed, the capacity to integrate external knowledge and performing R&D (networking, science–industry linkage, cooperation with other firms, belonging to a group) is related to the use of appropriation instruments. We find that appropriation instruments have a significant effect on product innovation. The effect on process innovation is not significant for Tunisian firms.