This paper focuses on niche entry patterns in the LAN equipment industry in the 1990s. We analyze an original data-set of LAN equipment consisting of more than 1,000 hubs and switches marketed between 1990 and 1999. Modularity emerged as a design strategy that supported incumbent firms’...

The rise of Fast Ethernet as the dominant standard for high speed connection in the Local Area Network industry is chosen to analyse the relevance of increasing returns and network externalities in determining the speed of standard diffusion. Although it was not the first standard to emerge,...

We investigate the relationship between product innovation and firm survival for a sample of 121 firms in a high-tech industry. We find that location near the technological frontier is an important determinant of fim survival. Firms located near the frontier are also more likely to be acquired...

Technical change can affect existing products very rapidly and at an uneven pace depending on the type and on the age of an industry. In young and fast growing industries, the process of technological change usually entails a series of improvements in existing products that affect their...

The performance of new companies coming from the demand side of the semiconductor industry is examined and it is compared with the performance of entrants coming from the semiconductor industry itself and with other types of entrants. By using a dataset of more than one thousand start-ups...

The Italian industrial sector is characterized by a number of peculiarities compared to other advanced countries. One of these is the small average size of its firms. This particular model of organization of production, based on the small dimension and often on informal relationships within and...

The paper provides a contribution to the recent debate about targets and effectivenessof network policies at the EU level, by presenting a detailed analysis of the large R&D network that has emerged over Framework Programmes. Social network analysis and graph theory are employed to describe...

This paper analyzes the manufacturing sector of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic between 1993 and 2001 and provides a set of stylized facts concerning the changes occurred in the skill composition of the workforce and in the earning structure by skills on one hand, and in trade flows and...

Despite a declining trend in its world export market share since the beginning of the 90s, Italy is still today the world’s 7th exporter and importer, 7th as share of world GDP, 25th in the ranking of world per capita incomes in PPP terms. However Italy’s potential growth of output and...

After a prolonged postwar period of remarkable foreign ownership penetration, in the last two decades Italy lost its high position as a country of destination of worldwide inward FDI. At the beginning of the new millennium, Italy ranks about 13 th regarding the stock, and 21 st regarding the...