Innovation and Institutions is an extensive elaboration on the make up of systems of innovation. It examines why some countries are more innovative than others, why national styles of innovation differ, and goes on to explore why some countries make radical innovations but fail to successfully...

Innovative firms face two major kinds of risks in developing new technologies: competence destruction and appropriability. High levels of technical uncertainty and radical changes in knowledge in some fields generate high technical failure risks and make it difficult to plan research and...

Japanese multinational companies (MNCs) have often been portrayed as highly centralised firms that limit the roles of overseas subsidiaries to the assembly and sale of standardised products designed and developed in Japan (see, e.g. Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989: 51-2, 158-161). Their foreign...

Much recent work on firms' capabilities and competitive competences builds on Penrose's (1959) seminal contribution to the theory of the firm in emphasising their organisational nature, and the critical role of managerial routines in transforming resources into distinctive services (see, e.g....

Building on the work of Penrose (1959), Richardson (1960; 1972) and others, recent contributions to the theory of the firm have emphasised the importance of endogenously developed capabilities and competences for building sustained competitive advantages (see, for example, Foss and Knudsen, 1996)....

A central tenet of economic sociology is that culture and regulatory institutions help to constitute the nature of economic actors and guide their actions, thus affecting economic outcomes (see, e.g., DiMaggio, 1994; Smelser and Swedberg, 1994). As socially organised agents operating in different...