Review of "Innovation in Multinational Corporations in the Information Age: The Experience of the European ICT Industry" (2002), London, Edward Elgar", authored by Grazia Santangelo

«Pay 1 and buy 3!» This might be the proper advert for a volume which frames together, in a coherent setting, three «hot» issues of the current economic debate: innovation – one of the most acclaimed engine of growth – Multinational Corporations (MNCs) – the representative agent of the incumbent globalisation process – Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) – the technological system at the basis of the so called New Economy. «Non-European customers» should not been discourage from the «label»: the experience of the European ICT industry is explored on the basis of general findings the author supplies for the largest world corporations. The basic «ingredient» of the book is of «certified quality» too: the University of Reading database on 399 patents released by the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) in as many as 56 technological sectors, the author allocates to a variable, but still high number of corporate groups, in turn distributed along 14 industries. The extended temporal span to which the database refers – from 1965 to 1995 – the patent mapping to the corporate research location it includes – either home-based or abroad-located – the geographical regionalisation it has recently undertaken – in 77 regions at the NUTS 1 level, 206 at NUTS 2 and 301 at NUTS3 – and the integration the author carries out for it with the ARPA database on Strategic Technological Partnerships, all identify an extraordinary powerful «data-generator», whose details are structured in useful Appendixes. On the ba170 sis of it, several issues on the geographical dispersion and specialisation profiles of the MNC innovative activity are investigated, both in general and with respect to the ICT European sector in particular.