Study on the mapping of the Greek microelectronics, semiconductors, and related services ecosystem: trends and prospects

he objective of the study is to map the Greek microelectronics and semiconductor ecosystem and to assess its dynamics. Within the framework of the project, the following will be carried out:

  • Mapping of the ecosystem, documenting the companies and other stakeholders in the semiconductor sector in Greece, with emphasis on their characteristics, economic figures, and position in the value chain.

  • Assessment of key economic performance indicators and quantification of the ecosystem’s multiplier impact on the Greek economy.

  • Identification of appropriate industrial policies and strategies to strengthen the ecosystem in the country, in alignment with the current national and European policy framework.

The project includes an empirical primary field survey, conducted through questionnaires and interviews with companies in the sector, aiming for the first time in Greece to reliably capture its identity, dynamics, and growth prospects.

New project in collaboration with ICAP Advisory for the creation and operation of a business incubator in the region of Western Macedonia

The project is a collaboration between LIEE and ICAP Advisory. The overall objective of the project, which has been undertaken by ICAP Advisory as the contractor, is to create and operate a business incubator in the region of Western Macedonia. The Incubator provides:

  • hosting infrastructure for businesses at different stages of development
  • preliminary information, selection, and training activities in application cycles
  • support and consulting services
  • accompanying services to support the exit of businesses

Within the framework of the incubator’s operation, LIEE has undertaken the scientific support of businesses or businesses under formation for the duration of their stay in the Incubator. This support includes personalized consulting sessions on entrepreneurship and innovation, the formulation of open innovation project proposals, support for the search for and creation of open innovation links, and the pilot implementation of open innovation projects.

LIEE also assists in the organization and implementation of Open Innovation Workshops with the aim of cultivating and strengthening a culture of innovation among the project beneficiaries. These workshops will focus on the development of open innovation strategies and the design of open innovation 2.0 projects.

 

Mechanism to support new and existing businesses in the OCT area

The project concerns support services to existing and start-up businesses in the Municipality of Athens for the improvement of their competitiveness and their comparative self-assessment, aiming at the creation of new businesses and the improvement of the operation of existing ones, especially in the areas of regional smart specialization. The project will develop a set of quality criteria and a self-assessment tool specific to the sectors of interest with 20 questionnaires and pilot application of the criteria in selected enterprises

Creation of support structures for innovation and knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship in the Peloponnese Region

The aim of the project is the design, creation and operation of an integrated network of structures for the promotion and support of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Peloponnese Region.

Specifically, LIEE  undertakes the implementation of three (3) studies.

Furthermore, the LIEE will provide scientific support in all the Phases of the Project and in particular in the staffing of the Evaluation Committees of the innovation competitions and hackathons, in the process of diagnostic needs of business models, as well as in the thematic content of the actions.

Leveraging Global Value Chains for Innovation and Competitiveness: The Case of Greece (GRinGVCs)

This is a two-year research project will investigate the participation of Greece in global value chains (GVCs) at different levels (country, sector, firm), focusing on the underlying role of knowledge flows and innovation development as determinants of the country’s catching-up in terms of structural competitiveness in global markets and leveraging globalization as a growth strategy.

The project has four main objectives:

  • To map Greece’s participation in GVCs, providing a rich set of participation indicators at the sector and country level.
  • To study the participation incentives, integration strategy and expected benefits at the firm level, through a large-scale survey on selected sectors.
  • To investigate the nexus of GVC participation, innovation performance and international competitiveness at the sector and firm level and unveil the underlying structural mechanisms that facilitate or hinder it.
  • To provide evidence-driven policy recommendations and inform Greece’s relevant research, technology, and innovation (RTI) policy interventions.

The project will inform Greece’s Smart Specialization (S3) and future RTI strategies, focusing on three main pillars that these strategies aim to facilitate, namely globalization, growth, and competitiveness. The project treats these pillars as an interconnected triangle, where the main challenge is how to leverage globalization as a strategy for growth and competitiveness, through knowledge diffusion and innovation development in GVCs. In particular, the project aims to provide conceptual and empirical insights on the GVC-related dimensions of this triangle, which are rather underexplored for the Greek economy case.

The project’s objectives are expected to address the following challenges:

  • Investigate and identify the benefits of participation in GVCs at the sector and firm level.
  • Examine whether GVC participation holds innovation and growth potential for Greek firms and sectors.
  • Understand how GVCs interact with the Greek national Innovation System (IS) and the ways GVC participation can enhance and upgrade the country’s innovation capabilities.
  • Address Greece’s catching-up in terms of integration and competitiveness in global markets.
  • Highlight the pervasive structural weaknesses that hinder the catch-up process and the potential comparative advantages that may facilitate it.
  • Inform the country’s GVC participation strategy through a coherent and integrated set of policy and managerial recommendations.

 

Project logo and poster

 

The project’s logo (left) and  information poster are ready!

 

 

Project Deliverables and Databases
  • The GRinGVCs database [Deliverable 2.2] is available here.

This dataset provides information on GVC participation, positioning, and network analytics indicators for 45 industrial sectors and corresponding groupings (NACE Rev. 2) across 77 economies, including all EU27 member states and other OECD countries, for the period 1995–2020.

  • The ESPAT database [Deliverable 3.2] is available  here.

This longitudinal dataset contains information on patent data (applications and grants) filed with the European Patent Office (EPO) for 99 industrial sectors at the 2-digit ISIC Rev.4/NACE Rev.2 sector level, covering 24 European countries from 1985 to 2020. The data are assigned to sectors by applying the Lybbert & Zolas (2014) weights of sector-technology field correspondence to EPO patent data retrieved from the OECD. The dataset provides patent data based on the applicant’s and inventor’s country of residence, on an annual basis, in two formats: i) patent applications and grants (flows), and ii) patent applications’ and grants’ stocks, estimated through the perpetual inventory method (PIM) using a 15% depreciation rate.

Dissemination and Communication Activities
  • 14th Panhellenic Conference of Chemical Engineering

A full paper by Dimas, P., Stamopoulos, D., Panagiotopoulos, P., Protogerou, A. (2024), titled “Mapping the participation of Greece in global value chains”  was presented in a poster form in the 14th Panhellenic Scientific Conference of Chemical Engineering, held on 29-31 May 2024 in Thessaloniki, with more than 500 participants. The paper featured results produced under WP2 of the project and was also included in the conference proceedings.

 

  • 36th Annual EAEPE Conference

A working paper by Stamopoulos, D., Dimas, P., and Protogerou, A. (2024), titled “Participation and Positioning of Greek Sectors in Global Value Chains and Evolution of their Trade Patterns’’ was presented at the 36th Annual EAEPE Conference, held in Bilbao, Spain, on 4–6 September 2024, with approximately 350 participants. The objective of the paper was to map Greece’s forward and backward participation in Global Value Chains (GVCs) at both the country and sector levels.

The presentation was among the first contributions to the newly established research area Structural Economic Analysis (SEA) of the EAEPE Conference, and it attracted substantial feedback and comments. These inputs were instrumental in shaping the development of subsequent working papers and deliverables associated with WP3 of the project.

  • Researchers’ Night 2025 and 2024

Over two consecutive years, the GRinGVCs research team showcased its work at LIEE’s kiosk during the Researchers’ Night events hosted at the NTUA premises, which attracted more than 2,000 attendees. In 2024, the team contributed the poster “Mapping the Participation of Greece in Global Value Chains” (Dimas, P., Stamopoulos, D., Panagiotopoulos, P., & Protogerou, A.). In 2025, the team expanded its outreach with a new poster, “The Role of Intangibles in Global Value Chains” (Dimas, P., Stamopoulos, D., Panagiotopoulos, P., & Protogerou, A., 2025). At both events, team members engaged actively with attendees, sharing the project’s objectives and discussing key research insights. The photo was taken by a drone and relates to the 2025 event.

  • 20th Ermoupolis Seminar on the Information Society & the Knowledge Economy

Kyriakis, G., Dimas, P., Protogerou A.: “Greece’s position in Global Value Chains and its productive linkages”, a contribution based on the dimploma thesis of G. Kyriakis conducted at LIEE/NTUA. The work examined the integration of Greek manufacturing in GVCs using the GRinGVCs database. The seminar, organized by LIEE on 10-13 July 2025 in Syros with 100 participants, hosted the presentation within the session “Productive Reconstruction and Sustainable Development”.

 

  • 51st EBES Conference

Two research outputs from the project’s WP3 were accepted for presentation at the 51st International Conference of the Eurasia Business and Economics Society (EBES), held in Rome on April 11-13, 2025, with 200 participants:

  1. Dimas, P., Stamopoulos, D., Kontolaimou, A., Protogerou, A.: “Global Value Chains and Industrial Innovation in Europe”. This study, jointly utilizing the GRinGVCs and the ESPAT databases, empirically investigated the contribution of GVC participation to the development of technological innovation in the European industry.
  2. Dimas, P., Stamopoulos, D., Kontolaimou, A., Protogerou, A., Panagiotopoulos, P.: “What Drives Participation in Global Value Chains in the EU?”. This study, using the GRinGVCs database, examined the determinants of participation in global value chains (GVCs) for the EU-27 and the UK over the period 1995-2020.

 

  • 37th Annual EAEPE Conference

Two research outputs from the project’s WP3—building on the GRinGVCs and ESPAT datasets developed earlier under WP2 and WP3, respectively—were presented at the 37th Annual EAEPE Conference which took place in Athens, Greece, on 24–26 September 2025 and brought together approximately 350 participants. These outputs focused on the determinants of GVC participation and its contribution to industrial innovation:

  1. Protogerou, A., Dimas, P., Kontolaimou, A., Stamopoulos, D. “Linking Global Value Chains to Industrial Innovation: Evidence from the EU“.  The scope of this study was to empirically investigate the contribution of global value chain (GVC) participation to the development of technological innovation in European countries.
  2. Stamopoulos, D., Dimas, P., Kontolaimou, A., Panagiotopoulos, P., Protogerou, A. “A study on the determinants of participation in global value chains in the EU”. This study aimed to empirically examine the determinants of GVC participation at the country level for the 28 EU member states over the period 1995–2020, with a particular focus on technological and knowledge-related factors—specifically, intangible assets—that shape GVC engagement.

        

 

  • Researchers’ Night 2025

The GRinGVCs team was for the second year in a row in LIEE’s kiosk with a new poster presentation in this year’s Researchers’ Night on 26 September 2025 at NTUA’s main Zografou campus,  with the attendance of more than 2000 people, discussing the project’s aims and objectives with interested member of the wider public.

Publications in peer-reviewed journals

Dimas, P., Stamopoulos, D., & Protogerou, A. (2025). A longitudinal dataset of sector-level patent data for Europe. Data in Brief, 112095. The first academic paper publication stemming from the project [based on the output of Deliverable 3.2: “A longitudinal dataset of sector-level patent data for Europe” (ESPAT database)] was published in Elsevier’s Data in Brief in October 2025. This paper presents a comprehensive dataset of patent applications and grants at the 2-digit ISIC Rev. 4 / NACE Rev. 2 sector level for 24 European countries over 1985–2020. Sectoral assignment is based on sector–technology correspondence weights applied to European Patent Office patent data retrieved from the OECD. The dataset supports sector-level empirical research in the economics of innovation, international economics, and industrial organization, and constitutes a valuable resource for policy analysis in areas related to industry and science, technology, and innovation (STI) policy.

Dimas, P., Kontolaimou, A., & Protogerou, A. (2025). Revisiting Greece’s participation in Global Value Chains: New evidence at the sector level.  Greek Economic Outlook 58, pp. 74-92. A further publication—issued in both English and Greek—appeared in Greek Economic Outlook, the scientific journal of the Centre of Planning and Economic Research (KEPE), in October 2025. The article examines Greece’s participation in Global Value Chains (GVCs), focusing on sector-level patterns and drawing on the GRinGVCs database for the period 1995–2020. The analysis differentiates between forward and backward participation, as well as between simple and complex value-added flows.

 

Academic theses conducted within the GRinGVCs project

Three undergraduate theses were completed in September 2025 at LIEE (School of Chemical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens). The first two were based on the GRinGVCs dataset developed in WP2, while the third drew on field survey dataset produced in WP4:

  1. Stefou E.,“Mapping the Participation of EU Countries in Global Value Chains”
  2. Kyriakis G.,“Mapping the Participation of Greek Manufacturing in Global Value Chains”
  3. Kasteroudis P.,“Integration of Greek Manufacturing Firms into Global Value Chains: Determinants and Innovation Benefits.”

In addition, three further undergraduate theses were launched during the final months of the project and will exploit the project’s datasets to examine new research questions.

Finally, a PhD thesis was launched at LIEE in May 2025 under the supervision of the project’s Principal Investigator, Aimilia Protogerou. The dissertation, undertaken by Agapi Dimogianni and titled “Greece’s Participation in Global Value Chains as a Driver of Innovation and Competitiveness,” will build directly on the empirical foundations of the GRinGVCs project by further exploiting, enriching, and expanding its datasets.