Cross-functional teams play a potentially important part in the innovation process enabling knowledge sharing, the development of trust and overcoming spatial and organizational barriers. Using a supermodularity approach, we focus on potential complementarities which may arise when...

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...

Many recent papers dealing with the issue of knowledge spillovers have relied on patent data to extract information on so-called mobile inventors that is inventors designated by patent applications filed by different companies. In this paper we follow in this tradition, but with the aim of...

This paper investigates in an exploratory manner the licensing strategies pursued by firms whose business model is based on developing and licensing out their intellectual property rights (IPRs). These are not traditional suppliers, since they do not engage in production or commercialization,...

Innovation may be seen as a process of knowledge creation and the speed and direction of knowledge creation reflects the organizational set-up of the firm as well as its investments in R&D and training. Establishing ‘a learning organization’ where horizontal interaction and communication...

The paper examines an issue related to the discussion of national specificity - whether the group of OECD countries are characterised by a high degree of stability of their export specialisation patterns at the country level or not. During a period of nearly three decades from 1965 to 1992, 20...

In the process of transferring scientific knowledge to industry the role of individual academics has received less attention than the other actors in this process. This paper aims to identify the characteristics of these key individuals, or gatekeepers, by analysing them within the context of...

This paper explores the firm growth rate distribution in a Gibrat’s Law context. The aim is to provide an empirical exploration of the determinants of firm growth. The work is novel in two respects. First, rather than limiting the analysis to focus on the conditional mean growth level, we...

This study makes use of the results of a postal questionnaire sent to a sample of large private sector companies in Britain and France to address two key issues in the new institutional analysis of the firm. The first is the way the institutional environment supports and constrains the design of...

This paper considers the relationship between innovation, ownership and profitability for a panel of manufacturing plants in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Previous literature suggests that innovators are persistently more profitable than non-innovators, but little is known about how this link is...