This study investigates how local milieus foster innovation success in firms. We complement the common practice of linking firm performance indicators to regional characteristics with survey evidence on the perceived importance of locational factors. While the former approach assumes that...

This study focuses on the impact of innovation policies and R&D collaboration in Germany and Finland. We consider collaboration and subsidies as heterogeneous treatments, and perform an econometric matching to analyze R&D and patent activity at the firm level. In general, we find that...

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...

There is an emerging debate in the scholarly literature regarding the extent to which academic human capital contributes to firm performance. This debate centers on the nature of an academic scientist's human capital and its institutional specificity. Using data on the human capital of...

A significant amount of money is spent on programs to stimulate innovative activities. In this paper, we review the effects of a specific government-sponsored commercial R&D program from various angles. We start by evaluating whether we find positive effects of subsidies on R&D investment and...

This study investigates whether standard patent measures for the importance and basicness of patents are able to distinguish between 'wacky' patents and a control group of randomly drawn patents. Our findings show that forward citations are good predictors of importance. However, the 'wacky'...

When academic researchers participate in commercialization using for-profit firms, there is a potentially costly trade-off--their time and effort are diverted away from academic knowledge production. This is a form of brain drain on the not-for-profit research sector that may reduce knowledge...

Knowledge spillovers to competitors are regarded as an important aspect of the innovation process. While a company possibly benefits from incoming information on successful R&D conducted by other companies, a generally high probability of leakage of knowledge in an industry will negatively...