Financial constraints to innovation in the UK: evidence from CIS2 and CIS3

The role of financial factors as constraints to innovation in the UK is explored using data on individual returns to the second and third Community Innovation Surveys. It is found that financial factors do impact upon innovative activity and that impact is more severe in higher tech sectors and for smaller enterprises. These results extend but largely confirm the results in the extant literature by using a different approach to the standard cash flow based method, encompassing a wider class of investment phenomena (innovation rather than just RD) and exploiting a new data base.