The purpose of this paper is to test the possible catalysing role of in-house R+D in fostering the complementarity of innovative inputs on a sample of 3045 manufacturing firms drawn from the third Italian Community Innovation Survey (1998-2000). The interactions between four different sources of...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects of knowledge management on the innovation success of firms in Germany. Using a matching procedure on data from the German Innovation Survey of 2003 ("Mannheim Innovation Panel"), we pair firms applying knowledge management with twin firms with...

In the past decades the role of profit sharing schemes (PSS) as a way to foster innovation in a principal-agent context, and more generally of innovation in economic growth, have been widely acknowledged and studied. However, surprisingly little has been done to analyze the interactions between...

Building on the notion of general and specific human capital proposed by Becker (1962), the paper highlights the importance of employee training practices undertaken in firms as an important tool for human resource and knowledge management and focuses on the role of works councils as a specific...

This paper analyzes whether firms conducting internal R&D and acquiring external high-tech equipment experience a complementarity effect. For German CIS data we conduct a complete set of indirect and direct complementarity tests refining the analysis by looking at various types of innovations...

Cooperation can benefit and hurt firms at the same time. An important question then is: when is it better to cooperate. And how can an appropriate partner be selected? In this paper we present a model of inter-firm cooperation driven by cognitive distance, appropriability conditions and external...

In this study we investigate the factors that shape the attitudes of scientists toward starting their own business or working in a private sector firm. The analysis is based on data collected from scientists working in the German Max Planck Society, a research institution devoted to basic...

The claim of a positive association between a firm's social assets and its innovative capacity is a widely debated topic in the literature. Although controversial, such an argument has informed recent innovation policy across Germany, increasingly directed to cluster formation. In the light of...

We assess the efficiency of regional innovation systems (RIS) in Germany by means of a knowledge production function. This function relates private sector research and development (R&D) activity in a region to the number of inventions that have been registered by residents of that region....

This paper analyses the effects of innovation networks on product and process innovation and sales growth of high technology SMEs. Innovation net- works are positively related to both product and process innovation, i.e. knowledge creation. One exception is the negative effect of innovation...