While the course of technological change is widely accepted to be highly uncertain and unpredictable, little work has identified or studied the ultimate sources and causes of that uncertainty. This paper proposes that purely technological uncertainty derives from inventors' search processes with...

This paper contributes large-sample evidence to an emerging discussion on open innovation and firm strategy. We ask why a startup should participate in an open standards community. We propose four ways that participation might increase a startup's chances of a liquidity event: gaining...

Are lone inventors more or less likely to invent breakthroughs? Recent research has attempted to resolve this question by considering the variance of creative outcome distributions. It has implicitly assumed a symmetric thickening or thinning of both tails, i.e., that a greater probability of...

Whereas a number of studies have considered the implications of employee mobility, comparatively little research has considered institutional factors governing the ability of employees to move from one firm to another. This paper explores a legal constraint on mobility--employee non-compete...

Entrepreneurs, even more than employees, tend to locate in regions in which they have deep roots ("home" regions). Here, we examine the performance implications of these choices. Whereas one might expect entrepreneurs to perform better in these regions because of their richer endowments of...

No abstract available.

The broker profits by intermediating between two (or more) parties. Using a biform game, we examine whether such a position can confer a competitive advantage, as well as whether any such advantage could persist if actors formed relations strategically. Our analysis reveals that, if one...

We find that the enforcement of noncompete clauses significantly impedes entrepreneurship and employment growth. Based on a panel of metropolitan areas in the United States from 1993 to 2002, our results indicate that, relative to states that enforce noncompete covenants, an increase in the...

A growing body of research documents the role that organizational learning plays in improving firm performance over time. To date, however, this literature has given limited attention to the effect that the internal structure of the firm can have on generating differences in these learning...