International knowledge spillovers, especially through multinational companies (MNCs), have recently been a major topic of the academic and management discussion. However, most studies treat MNC subsidiaries as relatively passive actors without clear knowledge protection strategies. The goal of...

Nanomaterials are seen as a key technology for the 21st Century, and much is expected of them in terms of innovation and economic growth. They could open the way to many radically new applications, which would form the basis of innovative products. In this context, it seems all the more...

The knowledge produced by academic scientists has been identified as a potential key driver of technological progress. Recent policies in Europe aim at increasing commercially orientated activities in academe. Based on a sample of German scientists across all fields of science we investigate the...

Against the background of the so-called "European paradox", i.e. the conjecture that EU countries lack the capability to transfer science into commercial innovations, knowledge transfer from academia to industry has been a central issue in policy debates recently. Based on a sample of German...

Literature has identified formal and informal channels in university technology transfer. While formal technology transfer typically involves a legal contract on a patent or on collaborative research activities, informal transfer channels refer to personal contacts and hence to the tacit...

University technology transfer has attracted considerable attention in the literature with a focus on the institutions, the agents involved in technology commercialisation or the differentiation between formal and informal technology transfer mechanisms. There has, however, been little...

Innovation success depends heavily on firm's ability to set priorities and select the most promising options from its project portfolio before the odds of success or failure become visible and reliable. We ask: What does previous innovation experience tell firms about what not to do in the...

Virtually all empirical firm-level studies on the demand for labor do not include labor cost in the econometric specification. This is due to the fact that business and innovation survey data usually lack information on labor cost. This paper shows how reliable skill-specific and firm-specific...

In the following paragraphs we will discuss the "mapping of innovative clusters in national innovation systems". For this we have used a data set of almost 3.000 firms that participated in the first and fifth survey of the Mannheimer Innovation Survey (which is comparable with CIS data). The...