The effects of age, gender and economic sector

Finally, we will comment the results concerning the effects of some of the control variables. In the regression where all the four countries were taken together (Table 4.3), we found a negative effect of increasing age. The separate regressions for the four countries (Table 4.4) reveals that this applies only to the Netherlands and Norway. There is a positive effect of being female in Finland. This does not imply that males in Finland less frequently than males in the other countries have characteristics of being innovative learners at work. Rather, estimates based on the results of Table 4.4 show that females in Finland more frequently do. In Norway and Denmark there is no significant effect of being female, but in in the Netherlands the effect is negative. Additional analyses show that in Norway and Denmark there is a certain negative effect of being female when not including controls for weekly work hours (while including controls for economic sector), but this negative effect disappears after including control for work hours (females work fewer hours per week).

In the Netherlands, the findings concerning the gender effect are more striking. When not including controls for weekly work hours (but including controls for economic sector), the negative effect of being female is very large in the Netherlands. However, once including controls for weekly work hours (females work fewer hours), this effect is very much reduced. There is nevertheless a significant negative effect of being female in the Netherlands in all models. When added to the effect of workhours, the combined effect of being female and working part-time is large.

The distribution of workers according to economic sector is quite similar in the four countries (see Table 3.16), but the effects of economic sector on innovativeness differ between the countries. In particular, the results for the Finish sample are characterised by large effects of economic sector, also when controlling for other variables. In the full model, including all the independent variables (Table 4.4) economic sector appears to have very little impact in Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway. In Norway, there are however, significant negative effects of working in the construction sector and within sales, transport and support.

The differences between the sectors are larger in Finland than in the other countries. This applies, for instance, to the difference between ‘information and communication’, ‘finance and estate’ and

‘professional/scientific’ on the one hand, and the health and welfare sector, manufacturing and agriculture etc. (the reference category in the regressions), on the other. This nevertheless does not imply that workers in Finland in the sectors where the likelihood of being an innovative learner is relatively low, such as within manufacturing and the health and welfare sector, are less likely to be innovative strategic learners at work than workers in the same sectors in, for example, Norway and Denmark. Rather, the main difference concerns the very high probability of the workers in Finland within ‘information and communication’, ‘finance and estate’ and ‘professional/scientific’ being

innovative strategic learners. Also within sales and transport and construction, particularly the latter, the estimated probability of being an innovative strategic learner is much higher in Finland than in Denmark and Norway. (For the Dutch sample, the estimated probabilities are much lower than for all the three other countries regardless of economic sector.)

5 Summary and discussion

The definition of innovativeness in this report refers to a worker actively seeking new knowledge and utilizes the new knowledge. We consider that the worker possesses a high degree of innovativeness if his/her job to a large extent involves

- keeping up-to-date with new products or services, and to a large extent involves - learning-by-doing from the tasks he/she performs; and if the respondent - scores high on a set of active and creative learning strategies^,27 and in addition - quite frequently solves complex problems at work.

Another way to describe this worker is that he/she is an innovative strategic learner at work.

About 15 per cent of the workers in the four countries we have studied (Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Norway) meet these criteria. However, this varies from 9 per cent in the Netherlands to 21 per cent in Finland. The Netherlands scores at the same level as neighbouring countries like Belgium and Germany, while Norway and Denmark score at the same level as the neighbouring country Sweden, around 15– 16 per cent.

Country differences in the likelihood of being an innovative strategic learner at work are robust when controlling for a number of independent variables. Therefore, it is probably not the possible

unfortunate distribution of characteristics in a country sample that is decisive for the country differences. The effects of the same characteristics vary between the countries, but neither is this variation decisive for the country differences. This variation is not serving as a complete and satisfactory explanation for the country differences. This is illustrated in Figures 4.4 to 4.7. These figures illustrate the existence of country differences when country-dependent varying effects of the independent variables (as well as a constant distribution of the independent variables) are taken into account. Finland remains at the top, the Netherland remains at the bottom.

All the analyses confirm findings in previous studies showing that Finland is a leading innovation country. However, the dependent variable in this study concerns the properties of individuals in the workforce, while other studies mainly refer to composite indicators at the country level (IUS) or to surveys among firms (CIS). Denmark is also a leading innovation country in most studies, but is more in the ‘middle’ according to the analyses in this report. For Norway, also found to be ‘in the middle’ in this report, the results differ from those found in studies that refer to composite innovation indicators at the country level (IUS), where Norway ranks very much lower than Finland and Denmark, and also lower than the Netherlands. Although the Netherlands ranks above the EU average on IUS, we find

27 As described in Chapter 2, the active learning strategies refer to these items: ‘When I come across something new, I try to relate it to what I already know’; ‘I like to get to the bottom of difficult things’, and ‘I like to figure out how different ideas fit together’.

that a lower proportion of the Dutch workforce than in the other three countries can be characterised as being innovative strategic learners at work. It is difficult to explain these country differences but are further discussed below.