Research and development has always played a strategically important role in the survival and the growth of technology-based firms. R&D is positively linked to company performance measures such as sales, productivity and shareholder returns and in addition to this, facing increased competition,...

Knowledge-based groups or communities are complex systems that emerge, evolve and mature through stages that display specific features and capabilities of the community or group. Understanding these capabilities and features are fundamental to building sustainable economic, social and learning...

During the last two decades agent based modeling has become more and more used for the study of complex systems in several fields of Social Sciences and for decision making. Entities in a social system can be modeled as autonomous agents that interact in an environment. These models can be...

Patent race models assume that an innovator wins the only patent covering a product. But when technologies are complex, this property right is defective: ownership of a product's technology is shared, not exclusive. In that case I show that if patent standards are low, firms build "thickets" of...

The pharmaceutical industry is unique in its complexity. Markets are nuanced. Multiple regulatory regimes apply. Generic entry is an event with dramatic consequences. These characteristics have encouraged brand-name drug firms to engage in an array of conduct that exploits this complexity to...

An experimental study of changes of opinions about intransitivity caused by observation of deterministic intransitive objects was conducted. Aim of the experiment was to investigate influence of adults’ observation of triads of objects (The Intransitive Mobile Assault Towers and The...

This paper presents a model of local network effects in which agents connected by a social network each value the adoption of a product by a heterogeneous subset of other agents in their 'neighborhood', and have incomplete information about the structure and strength of adoption...

In a highly competitive global economy the development of sustainable, innovative responses from Industry is now vital. Many industries globally need to respond rather than react to current economic climate through sustainable (economically and environmentally) development. The steel industry is...