RelinC: The role of research, skilled labour and innovation in the Coronacrisis.

The project aims at understanding the role of firm-level innovation in promoting economic resilience to pandemic crises. The project bases upon the scientific literature on evolutionary economics and innovation studies, using concepts like adaptation and selection for understanding, in real time, the consequences of a pandemic crisis on a national economy. Empirically, the country under study will be Norway: by analysing a wide array of historical data, a clear picture of the innovation patterns of Norwegian firms will be described. To this purpose, a taxonomy of firms, built from firm-level and employee-level data, will be used to categorize Norwegian firms according to their research, development and innovation patterns. The project will then dig into real-time information on crisis-related bankruptcies and on policy measures aimed at struggling enterprises, in order to understand which parts of the innovation landacape of Norway, as represented by the firm-level innovation categories outlined above, seem to be most resilient to the crises. A main assumption of the project is that different innovation patterns could lead to crisis resilience. Finally, an update of a comprehensive firm survey on R&D and innovation will allow to investigate how the innovation landscape itself is going to change during and following the pandemic crisis.