This paper articulates the hypothesis that there is an optimal size of knowledge pools. Too little a density of innovation activities reduces the accessibility of external knowledge. Too large a density enhances congestion and reduces appropriateness. Firms can benefit from actual increasing...

P ATRUCCO P. P. (2003) Institutional variety, networking and knowledge exchange: communication and innovation in the case of the Brianza technological district, Reg. Studies 37 , 159-172. Elaborating on the literature on innovation systems and technological districts, this paper suggests that...

This Handbook brings together 49 international specialists to address an issue of increasing importance for the world’s post-industrial economies; innovation as it relates to services.

The paper aims at explaining the changes in how economic actors and their organizations acquire and coordinate innovative and productive capabilities. Using the illustrative evidence from organizational change in the automobile industry in Piedmont over the last 50 years, the paper describes how...

This comprehensive and innovative Handbook applies the tools of the economics of complexity to analyse the causes and effects of technological and structural change. It grafts the intuitions of the economics of complexity into the tradition of analysis based upon the Schumpeterian and...

This unique Handbook explores both the economics of the firm and the theory of the firm, two areas which are traditionally treated separately in the literature. On the one hand, the former refers to the structure, organization and boundaries of the firm, while the latter is devoted to the...

Technological knowledge can be understood as a collective good only when its production requires the absorption and integration of external knowledge. Such external knowledge is the outcome of R&D investments that cannot be fully appropriated by firms and generate spillovers. The exploitation of...