Emergent and declining themes in the Economics and Management of Innovation scientific area over the past three decades

A literature survey covers the state-of-the-art of a certain investigation field and is a critical evaluation that can help define new research and facilitate the understanding of the area by new researchers of that scientific field. Although there are already some excellent attempts to provide a survey in the Economics and Management of Innovation area, these are in general qualitative. Using bibliometric tools, which help to explore, organize and analyze large amounts of information, we characterize, in a quantitative way, the published literature in innovation area. Based on the 1047 abstracts of the articles published between 1974 and 2007 in the innovation area’s ‘seed journal’ we observed that the themes that have grown the most in recent years were “Open innovation, Copyrights, Intellectual Property Rights, Open Software”, “University-Industry Relations and Transfer of Technology and Knowledge”, and “Entrepreneurship, Incubation, Spin-offs and Entrepreneurial Universities”. In contrast, themes such as “Learning and Experimentation, Troubleshooting”, “Development of new Products, Processes, Markets, Organizational”, “Cooperation in R&D+I”, “Multinational/International trade in the process of innovation”, and “Management Policy of Science and Technology “, noted a marked decline.