I’ve been looking briefly at the introductory chapter of the book “Innovation, path dependancy and policy: The Norwegian case” (eds. Fagerberg, Mowery and Verspagen 2009). I’ll return with more on the book later, but for now, let me just note some interesting points made in the introduction.

First, a personal note. It is fairly obvious that oil, R&D and innovation are related in some way or another in Norway. Intuitively my guess would be that the relationship looks something like this: 1) we find oil 2) we want to extract oil and become filthy rich – R&D is needed. 3) Intensive R&D. 4) Innovation and diffusion of of new technology enabling us to establish oil-welfare utopia.

This, however has not been the case, or at least so it seems. While Norwegian economic growth over the past 30 years have been very strong, numbers suggests that it has been associated with lower levels of investments in R&D as a share of GDP than most other comparable countries (typically western european states – Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Iceland, germany, Denmark, Austria, France, Belgium, UK, the Netherlands and Luxenburg all do “better” than Norway). At firm-level this is reflected in innovativeness. The authors offer numbers suggesting that our firms in general innovate more than those in Greece, Spain, France and Italy, while we are lagging compared to nations like Germany, Finland, Sweden, UK and Portugal.

The authors explanation is that this is a result of a highly specialized economy, where few resource-intensive sectors eats most of the pie alone (typically oil and offshore-related industries and fish), thereby making innovation difficult in other sectors. This might suggest that I was correct in my relatively naive assumptions about how oil, R&D and innovation are related, but that this has had negative effects for other sectors (I’m sure the authors have more to say on this later, I’m speculating for now).

If I’m not guided way off by the authors here, this is obviously bad in a transition perspective. If we, compared to those around us, are locked into a pattern where R&D and innovation mainly occurs in the most carbon intensive industry around, we are bound to lag in terms of implementing alternatives. Current political debate, in my view, seem to reflect this. The relationship is often cited as being oil = welfare, therefore we need more innovation related to oil. It will be interesting to see what (if any – not sure if it’s that type of book) prescription the authors offer.