The Determinants of Design Applications in Europe

In this article we estimate the level of “Design Application” in 37 European Countries in the period 2010-2019. We use data from the European Innovation Scoreboard-EIS of the European Commission. We perform four econometric models i.e., Pooled OLS, Panel Data with Random Effects, Panel Data with Fixed Effects, Dynamic Panel. We found that the level of Design Applications is negatively associated to “Enterprise Births”, “Finance and Support”, “Firm Investments” and positively associated with “Venture Capital”, “Turnover share large enterprises”, “R&D expenditure public sector”, “Intellectual Assets”. In adjunct we perform a cluster analysis with the application of the k-Means algorithm optimized with the Silhouette Coefficient and we found three different clusters. Finally, we confront eight different machine learning algorithms to predict the level of “Design Application” and we found that the Tree Ensemble is the best predictor with a value for the 30% of the dataset analyzed that is expected to decrease in mean of -12,86%.