Public Funding, Collaboration and Intellectual Assets in a Moderate Innovator: Evidence From Portugal

Abstract

Innovation is a central driver of economic competitiveness, which grants science, technology and innovation policies a prominent role. In this respect, Portugal is a paradigmatic case: across successive editions of the European Innovation Scoreboard, it has remained a moderate innovator, below the European Union average, despite sustained public investment, with persistent weaknesses in intellectual assets and in the commercial translation of innovation. Although the literature widely discusses the relationship between public policy and innovation ecosystems at the macro level, firm-level evidence on the mechanisms linking public funding and collaboration to the creation of intellectual assets remains scarce, particularly in peripheral economies dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises. This study addresses that gap by analysing how public funding, collaboration and export orientation relate to the patenting activity of Portuguese firms. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design is adopted. In the quantitative phase, hypotheses on the association between patent applications and factors of public funding, collaboration and internationalisation are tested using chi-square and t-tests on data from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS 2022), covering 13,802 national firms. In the qualitative phase, two interviews with national experts, analysed through content analysis, interpret and contextualise the observed patterns. The results show that public funding is significantly associated with patenting, but with small effect sizes, whereas collaboration, particularly with universities, displays the strongest association, exceeding inter-firm cooperation; patenting, in turn, is associated with greater export orientation. An asymmetric articulation of the innovation system's helices emerges: a robust academic sphere and a structurally fragile business sphere that does not generate enough demand to convert funding and knowledge into intellectual assets. Reading these results through the triple helix model suggests that, in a moderate innovator, strengthening the articulation between academia and the business fabric is a precondition for the transition towards more complex and sustainable innovation ecosystems. The study contributes to the innovation management literature with firm-level empirical evidence from an under-explored peripheral context, and offers practical implications for innovation policy, underlining that public effort is more effective when directed at science-industry articulation rather than at direct funding alone. It also warns of the limits of indicators such as the European Innovation Scoreboard in assessing economies with Portugal's profile.