This paper investigates the role of skills and the division of labor among participants in collective inventions. Our analysis draws on a large sample of projects registered at Sourceforge.net, the world’s largest incubator of open source software activity. We explore the hypothesis that the...

Quantitative methods are employed to describe two fundamental processes in the creation of free (libre) and open source software (FLOSS) that are at work in the collaborative development environment of the SourceForge.Net platform: resource mobilization, and “entrepreneurial initiatives”...

The empirical studies relative to the Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) case stress the important role played by psychological and social motivations. However, the theories elaborated to cope with this dimension, such as “gift economy”, “epistemic community” or “community of...

The work studies the processes of growth of the world top 150 pharmaceutical firms, on the grounds of an original database which allows also disaggregate analysis at the level of single therapeutical classes and chemical entities.Our findings show that the industry -whose long-term evolution is...

This paper adopts sociometric analysis to explore the process of knowledge acquisition and diffusion in clusters of firms. By comparing the knowledge systems of two clusters selected for being at different stages of their development path, this study shows that the knowledge system of the...

This paper provides a description of the production process by comparing different frameworks in which to analyze the relations between inputs and output. The analysis is performed on a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We employ both parametric and non-parametric analysis....

Since the seminal work of Pareto, many empirical analyses suggested that the distribution of firms size is characterized by an asymptotic power like behavior. At the same time, recent investigations show that the distribution of annual growth rates of business firms displays a remarkable...

In an economic geography model where both a negative pecuniary and a positive technological externality are present, we introduce an explicit dynamics of firms locational choice and we characterize its long run distribution. Our analysis shows that economic activities evenly distribute when the...

The aim of this paper is to review the development of steam power technology in the light of the key ideas proposed in General Purpose Technology growth models. We intend to provide a critical evaluation of the interpretive power of such models, which are elaborated around three properties of...

This empirical paper analyses the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the technological diversification trend among the world’s largest manufacturing firms during the 1980s and 1990s. The objective of the research is twofold: firstly, to emphasise the emerging...