The chemical industry has often been accused of being highly responsible for environmental pollution, and chemical firms, before others, have been highly committed to solve environmental problems. In this respect, this paper assesses the contribution of the European chemical industry in...

According to the Sectoral Systems of Innovation and Production approach, the analysis of a specific sector has to describe its knowledge and technological base, existing complementarities among knowledge, technologies and products, the heterogeneity of agents, their learning processes and...

This work explores which factors increase firms' propensity to enter into international markets. The study draws on the resource-based view and assesses the effect played by firms' technological capabilities and cost structures on entry. While many research papers consider those two factors to...

This work explores the factors that spur firms’ propensity to enter in international markets. Among the whole population of Spanish firms active in the pharmaceutical sector (over the period 1995-2004), we identify those firms that have entered the US market by assessing whether they have...

This empirical paper analyses the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the technological diversification trend among the world’s largest manufacturing firms during the 1980s and 1990s. The objective of the research is twofold: firstly, to emphasise the emerging...

This paper investigates the relationships between firm organization attributes, namely a structure á la Chandler, and their inward looking or “exploitation” attitude in R&D and innovation. We argue that because of sunk costs and learning processes an inward looking behavior is a consequence...

It is widely believed that while society allows technology to be private property, scientific knowledge is public and open. However, over the past quarter-century there has been increasing patenting of quite basic scientific knowledge. This essay argues that this is potentially a very serious...

This note expounds the abstract fundamentals of the appropriability problem, re-assessing insights from three classic contributions – those of Schumpeter, Arrow and Teece. Whereas the first two contributions were explicitly concerned with the implications of appropriability for society at...