In socio-economic innovation processes, exaptations emerge from processes through which an initial attribution of new functionalities to existing artifacts or organizations leads to new artifacts and eventually to new markets. In this paper, I argue that exaptation may generate degeneracy,...

Acquisition of innovative firms is a widely observed phenomenon in high-tech industries. On the basis of distinct advantages of large and small firms, in this paper, we build a tournament model with possible acquisition activity of large firms to derive hypotheses on interdependencies between...

Europe's innovation gap relative to the USA is often attributed to its industrial structure in which new firms do not play a significant role, especially in high-tech sectors. This view of a structural European Union (EU) innovation deficit is popular in European innovation policy discussions,...

Non-producing patent holders usually have to license their innovations to users capable of marketing them and usually ignore their market value. This article is aimed at analysing the dynamics of licensing contracts for an innovation that is owned by an independent patentee and is applied in the...

We adopt a stochastic frontier analysis of innovative activity to disentangle countries’ patenting capacity from patenting efficiency. We analyse the determinants of innovative capacity of a set of 26 OECD countries plus China, over the period 1992--2007, to show if and how China's...

We provide the first theoretical analysis of the effects of human capital use, innovative activity, and patent protection, on economic growth in a model with many regions. In each region, consumers have constant relative risk-aversion preferences, there is no human capital growth, and there are...