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RICAFE2

The RICAFE2 project was launched on March 1st, 2006 and is sponsored by The European Commission and DG-Research. The S. Neaman Institute participates in RICAFE2 as a national research node coordinated by Harry Yuklea and including three researchers:

Amnon Frenkel in Work-package 2.2: “Location choice of high-tech firms in intra-metropolitan area”
During the past year, A field survey was completed among Hi-Tech firms located in four selected employment zones in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region. The sample of 118 hi-tech firms constitutes 27% of the 440 hi-tech firms located in the four zones. The firms in the sample employ 8,250 workers, constituting 18% of the total number of employees in hi-tech firms in these zones. Most of the hi-tech firms in the sample are small and medium size so far as number of employees. The dominant sectors among them are electronic components and equipment (33%), software (39%), and communications equipment (16%). Only a small number of firms belong to the biotechnology and medical equipment industries. Analysis of the database employing statistical models has already begun.

Shaul Lach in Work-package 2.3: “Incentives, constraints and objectives in technology licensing offices and the effectiveness of technology transfer activities”
This study focuses on the relationship between technological change and outsourcing. The project aims at developing a dynamic model that analyzes how firms’ expectations with regards to technological change influence the demand for outsourcing – an issue ignored in the previous models – and abstract from other considerations (e.g., transaction costs, specificity, etc.). The predictions of the model are currently being tested using a panel dataset on Spanish firms for the time period 1990 through 2002.

Harry Yuklea in Work-package 2.4: “Government policy and knowledge based entrepreneurship”
This study explores the idea that the ability of public policy to support the financing of innovative entrepreneurships must take into consideration the “weakest link” in the chain of interactions between different domains of financial activity. Therefore, pertinent actions in one field alone would not necessarily improve the overall performance, because the real bottleneck could reside in a different section of the chain. A model is proposed called  “The Plumber Model of Entrepreneurial Finance”, based on the idea that planning an effective entrepreneurial financing system is basically a capacity planning problem. 

More details are available on the RICAFE2 website

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