Organizational theorists have long acknowledged the importance of the formal and informal incentives facing a firm%u2019s employees, stressing that the political economy of a firm plays a major role in shaping organizational life and firm behavior. Yet the detailed study of incentive systems has...

If scientific knowledge is a public good, why do firms invest in research? This paper revisits this classic question with new data on patent citations to scientific publications by corporations. Using data on 4,736 firms for the period 1980-2006, we document that corporate investment in research...

Spillover of knowledge is considered to be an important cause of agglomeration of inventive activity. Many studies argue that knowledge spillovers are localized based on the observation that patents tend to cite nearby patents disproportionately. Specifically, patent citations are interpreted as...

We study how the inventive capability of a firm conditions its participation in a division of innovative labor. Capable firms are, by definition, able to invent; for them, external inventions substitute for their own R&D. However, external knowledge is an input into internal invention, and thus,...

Though previous studies have noted the role of skilled labor in the growth of the Indian software industry, they have not empirically investigated its importance. In this study we study the effect of the supply of engineers, measured by engineering baccalaureate capacity, on the regional growth...

We study the relationship between decentralization of R&D, innovation and firm performance using a novel dataset on the organizational structure of 1,290 American publicly-listed corporations, 2,615 of their affiliate firms, as well as characteristics of 594,903 patents that they hold. We...

Over the last decade, companies have paid greater attention to the management of their intellectual assets. We build a model that helps understand how licensing activity should be organized within large corporations. More specifically, we compare decentralization--where the business unit using...

This paper documents a shift in the nature of innovation in the information technology (IT) industry. Using comprehensive data on all IT patents granted by the USPTO from 1980-2002, we find strong evidence of a change in IT innovation that is systematic, substantial, and increasingly dependent...

The history of innovation in the chemical industry offers many insights for accelerating energy innovation. In this chapter, we begin by laying out the early history of the chemical industry for an overview of the role innovation has played in its development. We then explore three noteworthy...

Most technology startups are set up for exit through acquisition by large corporations. In choosing when to sell, startups face a tradeoff. Early acquisition reduces execution errors but later acquisition improves the likelihood of finding a better match since in the early market, there are...