Scientific management is the label Frederick Taylor attached to the system of management devised by him. In this article we present our discovery of very different scientific management principles that were developed roughly concurrently with Taylorism by German physicist Ernst Abbe, then owner...

Entry into an industry often clusters in regions where the industry is already concentrated,which is suggestive of agglomeration economies. Regional public research activities mayexert another attracting force on entrants into science-based industries. Empirically theseproximity effects are...

Using a new dataset encompassing more than 2,200 inventions made by Max Planck Societyresearchers from 1980 to 2004, we explore how licensee and technology characteristics affectthe licensing and commercialization of technologies from public research. We find noevidence that spin-offs and...

The adequate role of Darwinist concepts in evolutionary economics has long been a contentious issue. The controversy has recently been rekindled and modified by the position of "Universal Darwinism", most prominently favored by Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen. They argue that the...

Considerable debate surrounds the concept of entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper contributes to the discussion by bringing in concepts and findings from evolutionary economics. It makes three points. First, adopting an evolutionary market process perspective sheds new light on the nature...

Necessity spin-offs are organized by employees of incumbent firms to escape deteriorating job conditions. This paper proposes a conceptual model of the spin-off process. Necessity spin-offs are distinguished from opportunity spin-offs on the basis of their triggering events. An empirical...

We use new data on the location and background of entrants into the U.S. tire industry to analyze the factors that caused the industry to be so regionally concentrated around Akron, Ohio, a small city with no particular advantages for tire production. We analyze the states where firms entered...

This article studies entrepreneurial activities emerging out of one of Germany's most prominent dot.com firms: Intershop, a maker of e-commerce software. We show that Intershop spawned at least 30 spin-offs. The majority entered locally, giving rise to a small but growing software cluster and...

Based on new data, this paper studies invention disclosure, licensing, and firm formation activities of Max Planck Institute directors over the time period 1985-2004, and analyzes their effects on scientists' publication and citation records. The results are consistent with prior findings that...

The paper makes the case for an empirically grounded, bottom-up approach to theory building in evolutionary industrial economics. This approach is based on studying systematically selected industries that are comparable in key dimensions. It opens up opportunities for testing the relevance,...