Financial Intensity or Project Duration: What Drives Patents and Spin-Offs in Public R&D Projects?

The aim of the research is to examine the aspects that govern the innovation outcomes of publicly funded Research and Development (R&D) projects at the project level, focusing on the intensity of funding, implementation period, and the resulting induced private investment. The empirical model relies on a sample of 1,435 projects in the Attica Region and approximates a log-linear econometric model with the OLS technique and heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors. The innovation performance is measured using the logarithm of the total number of patents and spin-offs generated by an individual project. The findings indicate that final project budget and induced private investment have a positive and statistically significant impact on innovation outcomes, with the largest impact being that of private leverage. Conversely, project implementation does not have an ordered contributor to patent and spin-off production.