A VIEW ON THE NATIONAL CAPACITY OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE ABSORPTION

The concept of the Absorptive Capacity has been approached in numerous theoretical and empirical studies during the last 20 years, covering multiple facets of the relationships between various external sources of knowledge and the capability of a firm, sectors or national economy to identify, assimilate and apply external knowledge in order to increase its economic performance. Absorptive capacity (AC) has been extensively analyzed at the firm level, but significantly less consideration has been given to the AC at the national level. National capacity of absorption is definitely much more than the simple aggregation of the individual companies’ capabilities or of the sectoral capacities, due to many systemic complex factors that may add to, or detract from the national AC: the multiplication and propagation effects, access facilities the stock of national and international knowledge, various synergetic mechanisms, knowledge spillovers etc. Based on the literature available, the authors attempted to design a system of indicators to quantify the relative scientific knowledge absorption capacity of different European countries compared with the EU average and the EU leader. Further on, these indicators will be aggregated, providing a fundament for comparative weighted estimations of the national absorptive capacities for scientific knowledge across EU.