Social globalization and design innovation
Date
DOI
Authors
Furman, Jeffrey L.
Hsu, Po-Hsuan
Long, Yi
Version
Other
OA Version
Citation
J. Furman, P.-.H. Hsu, Y. Long. "Social Globalization and Design Innovation." Journal of Development Economics (under review, Fall 2021),
Abstract
While designs play a critical role in corporate innovation and business operations, the determinants
of design innovation (i.e., new aesthetic or stylistic forms) are largely underexplored in the
literature. Accumulating evidence suggests that openness to the exchange of ideas, the adoption
of progressive policies, and the circulation of human capital play significant roles in driving
regional innovative activities. In this study, we ask a variation of this question: Is there evidence
that social globalization, i.e., “the spread of ideas, information, images and people” (Dreher et al.,
2008, p. 43) – can drive the extent of national design innovation? We leverage a survey instrument
reporting on globalization levels, the KOF Globalization Index, to measure national levels of social
globalization. We find that national levels of social globalization predict design innovation, as
measured by the number of annual design awards granted by the Industrie Forum (iF) over the
period 1973-2015. To address the potential endogeneity in our analysis, we instrument for social
globalization using a differences-in-differences approach and an instrumental variable approach.
Our findings remain robust when we use U.S. design patents as an alternative measure for design
innovation. We further show that personal contact could be the main underlying mechanism for
social globalization to encourage design innovation.
Description
License
This version of the work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.