Inter-organisational innovation processes in the European food and drink industry

Although the food and drink (F&D) industry is Europe's largest manufacturing sector, few studies have explored its innovation activities so far. Starting from the widespread assumption that F&D manufacturers are supplier dominated 'à la Pavitt', we formulated hypotheses about their innovation activities. These were tested through Wilcoxon and Mann-Whitney tests on data drawn from a sample of 54,088 manufacturing firms (7,301 of which operating in the F&D industry) in 14 European countries, participating in Eurostat's 2008 Community Innovation Survey. The results confirm the supplier dominated nature of F&D firms, although also show that some largely anecdotal assumptions about the F&D industry's pattern of innovation cannot be empirically supported.