Abstract
The study investigates the influence of CEO attributes on innovation outcomes on all listed firms on the SBF120 index between 2001 and 2013. We provide the following results. First, business graduated CEOs are less prone to introduce new products while science educated CEOs are more likely to increase the number of patents in high-technology firms. Second, the longer is the CEO tenure, the lower are the innovation outcomes, specifically in hightechnology firms. Third, CEO owners are likely to invest in long term profitable activities such as innovative projects, which increases all innovation outcomes. CEO founders, however, are more concerned about the implementation of new processes. Finally, robustness tests show that the number of patents decreases, on the long term, in the presence of female CEOs.