The extant literature has primarily focused on the negative effects of economic crisis on firm R&D and innovation. Yet, some researchers hold a more optimistic view about the impact of economic crises on firm R&D. Based on Schumpeterian theory of innovation, Perez proposed Great Surge Model, which argues that technology bubbles would first install a huge innovation potential and then be squeezed by the crisis, eventually leading to the eventual arrival of a "golden age". To be specific, a great surge of development is depicted as being driven by a technological revolution and composed of two periods. The first is the installation period, during which new technologies emerge from the lab and grow to a large scale, accompanied by frenzied venture capitalist and speculation. This results in a major technology bubble followed by a crash. The second period is the deployment period, a time of creative construction that spreads the benefits of the new technologies and techno-economic paradigm across the economy, enables a global golden age and ends when maturity is reached. In other words, the ensuing golden age would be driven by a revolution in the ICT (information and communication technology). The years between the burst of the bubbles and the start of the deployment period is termed the turning point, involving a reconstruction of the whole economic system to unleash the potential of the technological revolution. In summary, Perez pointed out that economic crisis may bring about the shift of sociotechnical paradigm, thereby unleashing the golden age. Although it receives wide attention in academia and policy arena, Perez′s model is not without criticism.  
    Our study made an initial endeavor to test the Perez′s model empirically through a worldwide comparison of returns to R&D before and after the crisis. First, we hypothesize that returns to R&D increase after the crisis compared with the period before it. Furthermore, Perez has predicted the ripple-like pattern of each technological revolution as represented by the divergent rates of growth across industries, countries and regions – some dynamic pioneers of the revolution take a lead and then slow down, while those laggards accelerate. Correspondingly, our study examines the diffusion of the technological revolution by using the cross-firm, sector and country variations in changes in returns to R&D after the crisis. 
   To investigate these predictions, our study employed the data from the Bureau van Dijk (BvD) global database, which collects financial and operational information for publicly traded firms across countries. Our panel dataset includes 52,638 company-years from 63 countries for the period 1986-2014. After selection, we finally yielded a sample including 20,073 firms and an unbalanced panel with 117,774 observations (firm-years).
   The study has several findings. The results show that, after the crisis, (1) firms obtain more returns from R&D for both growth and profits; (2) low-market-share firms are more likely to enjoy a higher level of returns to R&D than high-market-share ones; (3) low-leveraged firms are more likely to enjoy a higher level of returns to R&D than high-leveraged ones; and (4) developing and developed economy-based firms show insignificant differences in returns to R&D. The results consistently demonstrated that firms benefit more from R&D investments, irrespective of performance type (growth and profits), after the crisis, strongly supporting the Perez′s Great Surge Model.
   Our findings have theoretical significance. First of all, our study makes important contributions to the extant innovation research by exploring the effect of economic crises on firm R&D and innovation. Using a panel dataset, our study represents a large-scale empirical examination of Perez′s prediction of golden age after the crisis. Moreover, our results go beyond Perez′s original model by revealing the contingent relationship between R&D and firm performance in the post-crisis period. 
   Our findings inform both managers and policy-makers. First, the policy focus needs to move from fighting the economic crisis to unleashing technological potential. Second, if the recent prosperity of entrepreneurship has resulted from the technological revolution of the fifth surge, a critical criterion for anticipating entrepreneurial performance is to see how well new ventures identify market opportunities to deploy the core technologies of the fifth surge. Third, best practices that were identified previously need to be revisited, including the ways of monitoring and industry recipes.