This study explores how capital markets, exemplified by venture capital, and recent trends in the patent system may influence innovation activity and the financing of small businesses. Specifically it is evaluated if there are costs and distortions of incentives related hereto. Additionally, the...

The paper aims at investigating how far transaction costs economics (TCE) concurs in the explanation of outsourcing decisions in firms characterized by “thick’ industrial relations, that is where unions and employees are involved in, and are sometimes able to affect, the relative managerial...

Although the branch of economics that deals with economic evolution has become established during the last couple of decades, its aims and potentials can most easily be understood on the background of the work of early pioneers. Joseph A. Schumpeter’s contribution not only analysed capitalist...

We investigate coordination strategies in the remote delivery of business services (i.e. Business Process Offshoring). We analyze 126 surveys of offshored processes to understand both the sources of difficulty in the remote delivery of services as well as how organizations overcome these...

Strong interaction of innovative actors within a local network is commonly said to increase the region-specific knowledge-stock, leading to a comparative advantage. However, it might also lead to a lock-in situation, if local trajectories are directed towards inferior solutions. Accordingly, it...

Traditional creative destruction theories distinguish disruptions as competence-destroying or competence-enhancing to incumbents’ capabilities, with the former case resulting in incumbents’ loss of competitive advantage in in-house R&D performance (even if complementary assets aid in...

Many theories either implicitly or explicitly assume that individuals readily move to locations that improve their financial well being. Other forces, however, counteract these tendencies; for example, people often wish to remain close to family and friends. We introduce a methodology for...

We model a two-stage R&D project with an abandonment option. Two types of uncertainty influence the decision to start R&D. Demand uncertainty is modelled as a lottery between a proportional increase and decrease in demand. Technical uncertainty is modelled as a lottery between a decrease and...

Studies analyzing the importance of intra- and inter-regional cooperation for regional innovation performance are mainly of qualitative nature and focus strongly on the positive effects that high levels of cooperation can yield. For the case of the German labor market regions and the Electrics &...

In this paper we argue that sub-national public units do have a wide range of innovation policy related tools and thus the opportunity to conduct a proper and effective innovation policy, independently from superior policy levels. However, as the following example of Bavarian technology and...