Reactions of Japanese industrial managers to government incentives to innovation — An empirical study

The set of studies employed a nine-stage model of the process indicating the potential influence of federal actions on the perceptions, attitudes, decisions, and innovation outputs of industrial firms and the further impact of the firms´ innovations on the economy. This study focused on four of these stages: awareness of the Government Incentive Programmes (GIP), attitudes toward them, general behavior affected by them, and specific decisions related to them. In the Japanese firms, it was found that once a firm is in the `attitude´ stage (implying awareness) it will very likely also be in the action stages (general and specific decisions related to the application of the GIPs by the firm). Acceptance of the GIPs (measured by the stage score) by the firms is positively related to the attractiveness of the GIP (measured by a scoring method), and has low correlation with the age of the GIP.