Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to argue for the need to reconcile managerial and economic approaches of the firm. Strategic management seems to be the perfect playground for this. Design/methodology/approach – The paper shows many divergences between the economic and managerial...

Economic studies that aim at comparing the patent system social efficiency versus an ex-post reward system rest on a traditional view of patents. They make the hypothesis that firms use the patent system only in order to be granted a short-term monopoly rent and therefore that patents lead to...

This paper explores entrepreneurship in biotech through the in depth analysis of four new ventures located in the Upper-Rhine Biovalley. One of the strengths of this paper is the presence of both successful cases of entrepreneurship and of cases of failures. This gives the opportunity to discuss...

The traditional perception of patents puts the emphasis on their importance to exclude imitators and to restore incentives to invent. This view is far too restrictive and at variance with many empirical and theoretical works. We show that these contradictions can be overcome by shifting from a...

This paper proposes a unified conceptual framework to analyse the multiple role and consequences of patents in the case of biotechnology research tools. We argue that the knowledge/information and independent/complementary nature of research tools define heterogeneous frameworks in which the...

This paper re-examines the concept of open innovation developed in organization sciences (Chesbrough, 2003a). We claim that this paradigm, which insists on the distributive nature of innovation among a wide range of heterogeneous actors, does not put enough emphasis on the condition of access to...