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Designing an Intangible Assets’ Business Survey: The State of the Art (308009)

Keywords: intangibles, business survey, business data collection, questionnaire design

The paper will focus on the experience achieved at international level by surveying the businesses’ efforts to invest in intangible assets (IA) in order to draw some guiding principles to be adopted in designing future surveys. The parallel exercises of designing an effective questionnaire to be used in IA surveys currently undertaken by the Italian Statistical Systems (as a joint venture between the Italian Statistical Institute and the National Institute for Public Policy analysis) and by the International Research Consortium Globalinto will provide an extensive knowledge basis to assess the quality of the most relevant experiences in collecting IA data from businesses and to highlight their key achievements.

A broad range of methodological issues will be addressed, from the identification of the target population and unit of observation to the scope of the survey, as well as the structure and contents of the questionnaire and the data collection methods to be recommended to survey managers.

The paper will first review pilots run over the last ten years – from the UK IA survey (2009, 2010) to the Italian IA survey (2013) but also considering the experiences of collecting data at the European Union level (Innobarometer, 2013) and in a few smaller European countries. All these surveys have adopted a specific concept of IA (even though the UK experience has been often seen as a model, in this respect) and, more important, have adapted some general IA definitions to the specific context where the surveys have been carried out, developing specific questions and examples to make the IA-related conceptual framework more understandable for respondents. Based on these earlier experiences, the paper will present developments toward a new statistical framework in order to lay down the basis for a standard IA questionnaire and a specific set of methodological guidelines to be broadly used as a reference for future IA surveys.