The role of public demand on innovation is the central theme of this exploratory study which tries to evaluate the weight of the canadian public sector as 1) first user of innovation; 2) user of inventions patented by Canadians; 3) buyer of manufactured products, 25% of innovations find their...

It is well known that many of the manufacturing practices advanced in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s emphasize bottom-up decision processes characterized by teams, the empowerment of multi-skilled workers on the shopfloor, demand-pull and horizontal decision mechanisms. These practices include...

Japan's corporate sector has, at different times in recent history, been organized according to every major model. Prior to World War II, wealth Japanese families locked in their control over large corporations by organizing them into pyramidal groups, called zaibatsu, similar to structures...

One of the important public policy issues in science and technology is to ascertain if and how firms' investments in research and development (R&D) contribute to technical progress at firm and industry levels. Griliches (1979) made a pioneering contribution to our understanding of economic...

The Innovation Union initiative of the European Union focuses on product and process innovation for tangible goods. The authors argue that it is essential to extend the scope of the initiative to include innovation for financial sector products, processes, and regulatory approaches. They make...

The Innovation Union initiative of the European Union focuses on product and process innovation for tangible goods. The authors argue that it is essential to extend the scope of the initiative to include innovation for financial sector products, processes, and regulatory approaches. They make...

In this paper, we consider models that describe foreign firms' and host countries' decisions on foreign direct investment (FDI) when host country product markets are characterized by certain types of market structures. We show that, under certain conditions, the host country and foreign parent...

Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) and others posit that rapid development requires a 'big push' -- the coordinated rapid growth of diverse complementary industries, and suggests a role for government in providing such coordination. We argue that Japan's zaibatsu, or pyramidal business groups, provided...