This paper investigates the role of external knowledge in the patenting activity of inventors that work inside firms, i ….e. industrial inventors. It does so with the aim of showing that inventors who combine the use of different sources of knowledge, i … a so-called productivity approach in which the inventors? knowledge sourcing strategies are used as explanatory factors …

, strategies and resources. Such changes in the organization of international production need further research on knowledge …

Main tasks of academia are to create new knowledge and to transfer that knowledge into the economy. Regarding this work …, four channels of knowledge transfer are considered (based on Hamm et al, 2012): (1) basic transfer e.g. publications, (2 … cooperative research. The question to be answered is: How do the different channels through which the knowledge is meant to flow …