A decade after their introduction, approximately three-quarters of a million European Registered Community Designs (RCDs) have been filed, and recent court cases suggest firms regard them as important for competition. This paper reviews design protection in the European Union, discusses this...

The need to economically identify rare subjects within large, poorly mapped search spaces is a frequently encountered problem for social scientists and managers. It is notoriously difficult, for example, to identify "the best new CEO for our company," or the "best three lead users to participate...

New entrants to a market tend to be superior to incumbents in originating radical innovations. We provide a new explanation for this phenomenon, based on markets for technology. It applies in industries where successful entrepreneurial firms, or their technologies, are acquired by incumbents...

Observable resources, particularly patents, alliances, and team experience, are known to affect a start-up's ability to attract venture capital financing. In this context they potentially fulfill a twofold function: as productive assets and, likely, as signals of characteristics of a venture...

The ability of firms to effectively use mechanisms that support them in profiting from technological innovation is key to outperforming competitors. Yet, such mechanisms have, for the most part, been studied in isolation, without accounting for interactions between them. We address this gap by...

Patent trolls, or NPEs, appropriate profits from innovation solely by enforcing patents against infringers. They are often characterized as relying on low-quality patents, an assessment that, if correct, would imply that eradicating such patents would effectively terminate the NPE business. In...