Knowledge and competence are increasingly regarded as the most critical resources of firms and economies. Much recent attention has focused, in particular, on the importance of 'tacit knowledge' for sustaining firms’ competitiveness, and its role in technological innovation and organisational...

This paper addresses a puzzle: How is it possible that a country that has established a broad, export-oriented industrial base at record speed, remains vulnerable to the vicissitudes of international finance and currency markets? I argue that the Korean model that was tremendously successful for...

The emergent “learning economy” is truly global in the sense that it deeply affects the whole world. The emergence of “learning societies”, though, is a process that takes place only in some regions, the patterns followed by this highly complex social process being far from converging....

This paper introduces a model of knowledge sharing of lead users located in a public and unrestricted community of users. While existing literature on knowledge sharing focuses on allocation and collaboration processes inside or among companies we extend this to the community level. We then...

In the time of “network economy”, industries and the public have stressed several “battles for dominance” between two or more rival technologies, often involving well-known firms operating in highly visible industries. In this paper, we are going to focus on the Chinese self-developed...

This paper presents a lexical definition of firms' flexibility and its operationalization as used in the DISKO survey of 1900 Danish private firms. This operationalization is highlighted by data from a highly flexible firm which was visited in 1997 as part of a follow-up upon the questionnaire...

This paper examines the factors that influence whether firms draw from universities in their innovative activities. The link between the universities and industrial innovation, and the role of different search strategies in influencing the propensity of firms to use universities is explored. The...

The literature is inconclusive as to whether Marshallian specialization or Jacobian diversification externalities favour regional innovativeness. The specialization argument poses that regional specialization towards a particular industry improves innovativeness in that industry. Regional...

An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the joint OECD/Eurostat workshop on innovation surveys, OECD, Paris, June 30th 1999. The paper addresses some issues about the nature of innovation surveys (particularly the new Community Innovation Surveys) and how they might be improved to take...