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.