complementarities in the search for innovation managing markets and relationships abstract extant research has characterized a firm s search for external knowledge in its innovation activities as either relational or transactional in nature the former implies that a firm chooses and develops collaborative relationships with knowledge sources like universities customers or suppliers while the latter suggests transactions governed by markets for technology we argue that prior literature has ignored that both search strategies are interrelated and complementary adopting one strategy has a higher marginal return on innovation performance if the other one is present moreover we suggest the benefits from complementarity to be higher when a firm is more distant to the technological frontier in the industry and when markets for technology in that industry are shallow we test our hypotheses on a sample of 3921 german firms from 2001 to 2009 and find support for our hypotheses

hybrid r d we develop a model of r d collaboration in which individual firms carry out in house research on core activities and undertake bilateral joint projects on non core activities with other firms we develop conditions on the profit functions of the firm under which r d investments in different projects of a firm are complementary we show that this condition is met by standard price and quantity setting oligopoly models we then study the relation between the number of joint projects and investments and profits in this context we identify a second aspect of complementarity equilibrium investments in in house as well as in each joint project are increasing in the number of projects however we find that an increase in number of joint projects of all firms lowers collective profits suggesting the presence of excessive incentives for conducting research

international scientist mobility and the locus of knowledge and technology transfer abstract despite the growing interest of scholars and policymakers to better understand the determinants for researchers in public science to transfer knowledge and technology to firms little is known how temporary international mobility of scientists affects both their propensity to engage in knowledge and technology transfer ktt as well as the locus of such transfer based on a sample of more than 950 german academics from science and engineering faculties we investigate how the duration and the frequency of scientists visits at research institutions outside their home country affect ktt activities we find that most mobile scientists engage in ktt to firms both in the host and in their home country suggesting that ktt activities to firms abroad do not substitute or crowd out but complement ktt to firms in the home country we further find that the longer research visits abroad are the higher the likelihood that scientists engage in ktt to firms again both in the host and the home country however the more frequently scientists visit institutions abroad the more likely they are to engage in ktt to firms only in their home country our results therefore provide evidence for the benefits of brain circulation the article contributes to the growing strand of the literature on scientist mobility and on the determinants of industry science linkages at the individual level

greenhouse gas emissions per unit of value added geva a corporate guide to voluntary climate action abstract how much must i reduce my greenhouse gas ghg emissions if i want to do my fair share to contribute towards the global effort to keep global warming below a 2 c rise in average temperature over preindustrial times this paper suggests an answer for nations and corporations that want to move ahead of legislation on a voluntary basis if all nations reduce their ghg emissions per unit of gdp by 5 per year global ghg emissions will be 50 lower in 2050 than in 2010 as long as the global economy continues to grow at its historical rate of 3 5 per year the suggested 5 per year decline can be translated into a corporate resolution to reduce corporate ghg emissions per unit of value added geva by 5 per year if all corporations cut their geva by 5 per year the same global result will be achieved the suggested 5 per year decline can be used as a guideline for responsible action on a voluntary basis the guideline is unlikely to be made mandatory soon but compulsory publication of the necessary emissions and productivity data by nations and corporations could help civil society highlight top performers

pollution and economic growth evidence from central and eastern european countries abstract we investigate the relationships between pollution and growth in eleven central and eastern european cee countries aggregate results robust to different estimators and control variables reveal an increasing nonlinear link between gdp and co2 for the group of cee countries however at a disaggregated country level the relationship between gdp and co2 is characterized by much diversity among cee countries namely n shaped inverted n u shaped inverted u monotonic or no statistical link thus despite an aggregated upward trend some cee countries managed to secure both higher gdp and lower co2 emissions from a policy perspective eu policymakers could pay more attention to these countries and amend the current unique environmental policy to account for country heterogeneities in order to support economic growth without damaging the environment

the effects of human resource management practices on productivity a study of steel finishing lines the authors investigate the productivity effects of innovative employment practices using data from a sample of thirty six homogeneous steel production lines owned by seventeen companies the productivity regressions demonstrate that lines using a set of innovative work practices which include incentive pay teams flexible job assignments employment security and training achieve substantially higher levels of productivity than do lines with the more traditional approach which includes narrow job definitions strict work rules and hourly pay with close supervision their results are consistent with recent theoretical models which stress the importance of complementarities among work practices

complementarity and external linkages the strategies of the large firms in biotechnology in biotechnology large firms enter into different kinds of linkages with universities and small medium sized research intensive firms we test the hypothesis that the strategies of external linkage of the large firms with other parties are complementary to one another we show that if any two strategies are complementary i e undertaking more of one strategy raises the marginal value of the other then they are positively correlated using data for a sample large us european and japanese chemical and pharmaceutical producers we find that the strategies above are positively correlated even after controlling for firm specific characteristics

exploration during turbulent times an analysis of the relation between cooperation in innovation activities and radical innovation performance during the economic crisis this article investigates the relation between cooperation in innovation activities and innovation before and during the last economic recession we find that cooperation in innovation activities has a stronger relation with radical innovation performance during the economic recession than before this being true irrespectively of whether the partners are national or international this benefit from cooperation during the economic turmoil is higher in the case of firms having different types of partners simultaneously we also find that past cooperation in innovation activities is positively associated to innovation performance during the crisis

complementarities of innovation activities an empirical analysis of the german manufacturing sector abstract innovation strategies in manufacturing often involve internal rd it is based on data from the german part of the community innovation survey cis 3 the results provide evidence for significant complementarities between internal r d and r d cooperation but cast doubt on the complementarity of internal and contracted r d since a productivity effect on firms patenting probability or sales with new products cannot be found

innovation complementarity and scale of production we present an econometrically feasible model that uses the information contained in the innovation profile of each firm to test for the existence of complementarity among production and innovation strategies our approach is able to distinguish between complementarity and correlation induced by unobserved heterogeneity we apply the model to analyze the spanish ceramic tile industry where the adoption of the single firing furnace in the 1980 s facilitated the introduction of new product designs as well as opening new ways of organizing production our econometric results show that there is significant complementarity between product and process innovation small firms tend to be more innovative overall

does corporate r d investment affect firm environmental performance evidence from g 6 countries the rate of climate change due to global warming has become a substantial concern and appeared as a real world phenomenon in the recent years however it is imperative to know how business enterprises alter such concern recent studies involve a variety of firm level factors to create a robust link between business enterprises environmental and financial performance however little is known regarding the role of research and development r d investment on firms environmental performance using a firm level data for the period 2004 2016 from g 6 countries this study empirically investigates how r d investment affects the firm environmental performance measured by energy and carbon emissions intensities we find that r d investment improves the firm s environmental performance consistent with the theoretical argument of natural resource based view nrbv our findings are robust to alternative econometric specifications alternative variable specifications and sub samples our findings offer novel insights to the policymakers business managers and regulators

what goes around comes around effects of offshore outsourcing on the export performance of firms we examine the effect of offshore outsourcing on the export performance of firms building on the theories of international business the resource based view and transaction cost economics we argue that offshore outsourcing helps firms directly or indirectly to export more it may reduce their production costs and enhance their flexibility it may also provide them with new resources and market knowledge however the impact of offshore outsourcing depends on the resources and capabilities of firms to manage a network of foreign suppliers and to absorb foreign knowledge using a database of around 2000 manufacturing mnes in france in 1999 we find that offshore outsourcing increases export performance the effects being stronger in the export markets where firms import intermediate goods we also show that the firm size the organization of intra firm imports and the export experience moderate the effects of offshore outsourcing positively these findings have implications for firms and policymakers journal of international business studies 2011 42 334 344 doi 10 1057 jibs 2010 26

networks of innovators a synthesis of research issues abstract this paper will first summarise some key findings of empirical research in the 1960s on the role of external sources of scientific technical and market information in successful innovation by business firms this work demonstrated unambiguously the vital importance of external information networks and of collaboration with users during the development of new products and processes moreover the dilemmas of cooperative research in competitive industries were recognised and studied long ago 35 62 76 what then is new about the present wave of interest in networks of innovators are there new forms of organisation or new technologies or new policies which justify renewed research efforts since they go beyond those developments already analysed in earlier empirical and theoretical work section 2 reviews the evidence of new developments in the 1980s in industrial networks regional networks and government sponsored innovative activities it shows that there has indeed been a major upsurge of formal and semi formal flexible networks in the 1980s including some new types of network it also shows that some older forms of research cooperation have been modified and transformed the papers at montreal largely concentrated on the role of regional supplier networks which are a good example of such new wine in old bottles this paper attempts to locate the regional network discussion within a wider context of new developments in networking section 3 discusses the causes of these new developments and whether they are likely to remain a characteristic of national and international innovation systems for a long time to come or prove to be a temporary upsurge to be overtaken later by a wave of take overs and vertical integration finally section 4 sums up some of the other key issues which require further research and debate and the implications for social science theory

accounting for endogeneity when assessing strategy performance does entry mode choice affect fdi survival firms choose strategies based on their attributes and industry conditions therefore strategy choice is endogenous and self selected empirical models that do not account for this and regress performance measures on strategy choice variables are potentially misspecified and their conclusions incorrect i highlight how self selection on hard to measure or unobservable characteristics can bias strategy performance estimates and recommend an econometric technique that has been developed to account for this effect although this concern applies to a wide range of strategy questions to demonstrate its effect i empirically examine if entry mode choice acquisition versus greenfield influences foreign direct investment survival in specifications that do not account for self selection i find that greenfield entries have survival advantages compared to acquisitions this confirms previous findings however the significance of this effect disappears once i account for self selection of entry mode in the empirical estimates the results confirm that estimates from models that do not account for self selection of strategy choice can lead to incorrect or misleading conclusions

university industry collaboration and firms r d effort abstract this paper investigates the impact of publicly funded university industry collaboration on uk firms r d effort we test the hypotheses that project participation has a positive effect on firms r d expenditure per employee and on their share of r d employment the paper exploits a novel source of data made up of a set of u i projects funded by the uk engineering and physical sciences research council between 1997 and 2007 and firm level data available through the uk office for national statistics we employ propensity score matching to select an appropriate control group of untreated firms on the basis of the probability that they participate to u i partnerships we then estimate the impact of participation on firms r d effort in two points in time via ordinary least squares regression the results show a positive and significant impact on the share of r d employment two years after the end of projects this is also confirmed by a robustness check a positive effect on r d expenditure per employee is found both at the end of the project and two years later these findings are highly relevant for policy given that u i collaboration is among the most frequent policy instruments put in place by local and national policy makers to foster pre competitive research and firms r d activities

a novel approach for analyzing the effectiveness of the r d capital for resource conservation comparative study on germany and uk electricity sectors abstract limited access to energy resources and increasing demand for mitigation of the environmental impacts have necessitated higher production efficiencies therefore the promotion of r d activities has been one of the main parts of national energy policies in this research work two methods are used for assessing the effectiveness of the r d capital on resource conservation first by developing the resource included knowledge production function of the energy sector and second through direct assessment of the functionality of resource productivity from r d capital based on official data provided by national statistical centers a comparative analysis has been conducted to examine the effectiveness of r d in the electricity generation sectors in the united kingdom and germany in these analyses non renewable exergy cost is used as an index of resource depletion and environmental burden it is shown that due to non economic energy transition policies the inclusion of the r d investment does not result in statistically meaningful elasticity of production for the r d capital however according to the second method it is shown that the r d investment in the united kingdom has been more effective in resource conservation than in germany possible reasons for such differences are discussed and recommendations for further investigations are presented

real options logic revisited the performance effects of alternative resource allocation regimes we delineate three dimensions of resource allocation behavior that allow us to distinguish between real options logic and alternative resource allocation regimes sequencing low initial commitment and reallocation we then measure these in a product innovation context to test for the performance effect of real options logic vis a vis its alternatives sequencing which distinguishes dynamic allocation regimes more generally is associated with higher new product sales low initial commitment and reallocation do not show individual direct effects on new product sales however when assessed as a match we find that the fit between low initial commitment and reallocation yes yes no no increases performance significantly after controlling for such fit as well as sequencing we find no significant performance difference between real options logic and other regimes our findings imply that insufficient identification of real options logic picks up confounding effects which may provide an explanation for the inconclusive results in prior studies of real options and performance in addition to bounding the concept more precisely we contribute to theory by situating real options logic within the broader set of allocation regimes conducive to innovation performance in uncertain competitive markets

testing for complementarities in reduced form regressions a note abstract in many cases it is important to know whether choice variables for a decision maker are mutual complements but a structural model cannot be estimated a unified framework for testing for complementarity through reduced form regressions is provided

recruitment knowledge integration and modes of innovation abstract this paper investigates how the strength and intrinsic characteristics of firms knowledge bases and processing routines have evolved with the past inflow of employees the empirical analysis is based on linked public register and innovation survey data for norway it finds that recruitment from universities research institutes and higher education institutions has increased the capacity of firms to generate technical inventions yet the organizational knowledge bases and processing routines on which commercial innovation output depends have been strengthened only by the recruitment that has occurred from related industries implications for research management and policy are drawn

green r d for eco innovation and its impact on carbon emissions and firm performance abstract over the past four decades the results of the debates about the relationship between corporate environmental performance and corporate financial performance have remained inconclusive due to the lack of theoretical underpinning and availability of data this paper examines the impact of green research and development investment for eco innovation on environmental and financial performance the research is based on the resource based view and the natural resource based view which explicitly recognize the importance of resources and capabilities using a sample of japanese manufacturing firms during the period of 2001 2010 the study focuses on green research and development investment as a key proxy of eco innovation and carbon emissions in environmental performance our results show the presence of a negative relationship between green research and development and carbon emissions while green research and development is positively related to financial performance at the firm level our findings explicitly support that in order for firms to adopt a proactive environmental strategy to manage their environmental and financial performance to the best advantage they urgently need to organise unique resources and capabilities the findings of this study provide valuable insights and basis of scientific debate on how firms to engage unique organizational resources and capabilities for superior corporate environmental and financial performance

entry and patenting in the software industry to what extent are firms kept out of a market by patents covering related technologies do patents held by potential entrants make it easier to enter markets we estimate the empirical relationship between market entry and patents for 27 narrowly defined categories of software products during the period 1990 2004 controlling for demand market structure average patent quality and other factors we find that a 10 increase in the number of patents relevant to market reduces the rate of entry by 3 8 and this relationship intensified following expansions in the patentability of software in the mid 1990s however potential entrants with patent applications relevant to a market are more likely to enter it finally patents appear to substitute for complementary assets in the entry process because patents have both greater entry deterring and entry promoting effects for firms without prior experience in other markets this paper was accepted by bruno cassiman business strategy

do corporate global environmental standards create or destroy market value arguments can be made on both sides of the question of whether a stringent global corporate environmental standard represents a competitive asset or liability for multinational enterprises mnes investing in emerging and developing markets analyzing the global environmental standards of a sample of u s based mnes in relation to their stock market performance we find that firms adopting a single stringent global environmental standard have much higher market values as measured by tobin sq than firms defaulting to less stringent or poorly enforced host country standards thus developing countries that use lax environmental regulations to attract foreign direct investment may end up attracting poorer quality and perhaps less competitive firms our results also suggest that externalities are incorporated to a significant extent in firm valuation we discuss plausible reasons for this observation

the impact of competition on make or buy decisions evidence from the spanish local tv industry this paper empirically investigates whether changes in product market competition affect firm boundaries exploiting regulation induced shocks to entry barriers and differences in regulation enforcement across cities to obtain exogenous variation in competition we establish a negative causal effect of competition through reduced entry barriers and a larger number of rival firms on vertical integration in the setting of the spanish local television industry between 1995 and 2002 data and the online appendix are available at https doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2016 2633 this paper was accepted by bruno cassiman business strategy

co ownership of intellectual property exploring the value appropriation and value creation implications of co patenting with different partners combining both interview data and empirical analyses at the patent and firm levels we explore the value appropriation and value creation implications of r d collaboration resulting in the co ownership of intellectual property i e co patents we make an explicit distinction between three different types of co patenting partners intra industry partners inter industry partners and universities our findings indicate that the value appropriation challenges of ip sharing are clearly evident with intra industry co patenting where partners are more likely to encounter overlapping exploitation domains co patenting with universities is associated with higher market value since appropriation challenges are unlikely to play a role and collaboration may signal novel technological opportunities although we find some evidence that co patenting corresponds to higher patent value patents co owned with firms are significantly less likely to receive self citations indicating constraints on the future exploitation and development of co owned technologies

why do firms do basic research with their own money abstractthe question to be addressed is why do private firms perform basic research with their own money interest in this question derives from both analytical and utilitarian considerations there is empirical evidence in the united states which provides the main context for this paper supporting the view that basic research makes a significant contribution to the productivity growth of the economy 4 7 it is widely held that social returns from basic research are significant and higher than private returns and it is for this reason that most such activities continue to be financed by the taxpayer this also implies that measures aimed at increasing basic research by the private sector will be welfare improving in the united states the federal government in the years since the second world war has provided the vast majority of all funds devoted to basic research although the federal share has been declining in recent years and although that share is at its lowest level in about 20 years it still constitutes about two thirds of the total 10 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

interdependency competition and industry dynamics asystematic understanding of industry dynamics is critical to strategy research because individual firm performance dynamics both reflect and affect change at the industry level descriptive research on industry dynamics has identified a dominant pattern where prices fall output rises and the number of firms rises and then falls over time several models have been advanced to explain these patterns with a particular focus on explaining why a shakeout in the number of firms occurs in the most prominent models shakeout is generated by rising realized heterogeneity among firms that either is assumed to be unrecognized but determined ex ante or is generated by stochastic innovation outcomes coupled with convex adjustment costs and scale advantages in innovation and learning in this paper we develop an alternative model where heterogeneity develops among firms over time leading to a shakeout because firms must make choices about highly interdependent productive activities where the ideal combinations cannot be easily deduced or imitated by combining two established models a cournot model of competition with an nk model of interdependency in production activities we are able to advance an alternative explanation for the observed patterns of industry behavior including shakeout we show that variation in the potential for interdependency in activities among industries is able to explain varying levels of shakeout as well as differing patterns of entry and exit among industries notably the model generates several empirical predictions not apparent in past research and several that directly conflict with the results of prominent alternative models of industry dynamics specifically we show that when the potential for interdependency within an industry is low entry slows down and incumbent survival is all but assured whereas in industries where the potential for interdependencies is high shakeouts are severe and the rates of entry and exit remain high over longer time periods with decreasing survival rates for incumbents

toward an aspiration level theory of open innovation although open innovation has become increasingly established in the management literature comprehensive theoretical explanations of what drives firms to be open are sparse taking the perspective of the behavioral theory of the firm we conceive of open innovation as a form of nonlocal search arguing that firms will turn to open innovation when substantially under or over performing relative to their aspirations we further enquire how this relationship is moderated by firm specific innovation related resources human capital research and development investment and patents employing a representative survey of uk firms we find some evidence of moderation allowing us to present explanations of search through open innovation and contribute to the behavioral theory of the firm itself

a matter of location the role of regional social capital in overcoming the liability of newness in r d acquisition activities laursen k masciarelli f and reichstein t a matter of location the role of regional social capital in overcoming the liability of newness in r d acquisition activities regional studies external knowledge acquisition is a precondition for firms competitive advantage however young firms exhibit a lower propensity to acquire external research and development r d than their older counterparts the paper explores the role of regional social capital in moderating this aspect of the liability of newness the results show that young firms operating in regions with low levels of social capital are less likely to acquire r d externally however this is not the case in regions with high levels of social capital suggesting that the liability of newness in terms of acquisition of external r d does not play a role in these regions

forward looking solvency contagion abstract solvency contagion risk is a key channel through which systemic risk can come about we introduce a model that accounts not only for losses transmitted after banks default but also for losses due to the fact that creditors revalue their exposures when probabilities of default of their counterparties change we apply the model to run a series of simplified stress tests of the uk banking system from 2008 to 2016 based on two datasets of real interbank exposures between the seven major uk banks we show that risks due to solvency contagion decrease markedly from the peak of the crisis to the point of becoming negligible we also characterise the distributions of both vulnerabilities and systemic importances of individual banks thereby tracking the evolution of risk concentration

on the economics of carbon pricing insights from econometric modeling with industry level data abstract the literature which tests the porter hypothesis by studying the role of environmental policies on innovation is not only fragmented but mostly employs broad measures of environmental regulations in order to draw consensus in this literature and sufficiently incentivize the pursuit of environmental policy objectives further contributions on the economics of environmental regulations utilizing alternative methods and data are needed therefore our analysis takes the chinese national emission trading scheme ets as specific example of such a policy in the econometric analysis chinese carbon prices from this market are used and their impact on innovation is estimated using a dynamic panel data regression the main findings are that while a carbon price appears to stimulate r d intensity innovation input the boost in r d does not result into increased sales and profits for industries innovation output high energy consuming industries have higher tendencies to innovate but this takes place at the distribution and marketing stages of the value chain however since the energy requirement at these levels is less relative to the actual production stage the energy costs saving may be limited therefore to better the economics of carbon pricing in a competitive world in which risk aversion is a possibility policies which encourage energy intensive industries to innovate at the production stage would present opportunities in general these findings contribute to our understanding of innovation behavior and have the potential to stimulate new debates in the literature

risky innovation the impact of internal and external r d strategies upon the distribution of returns a b s t r a c t external innovation increases the profits of the median firm but also increases dispersion and the kur tosis of the distribution of profits this means that external strategies are risky and may require a very large number of attempts before average returns are obtained this puts smaller firms into a position of disproportionately high risk despite the earlier evidence that the rewards from innovation are positively skewed we find no effect of innovation strategies upon the skewness of the distribution of firms profits

the returns to foreign r d extant research on research and development r d internationalization has not examined how effective foreign r d investments are in generating positive returns for the investing firms in particular in comparison and conjunction with the effects of domestic r d investments we examine the effectiveness of international knowledge sourcing through foreign r d in an empirical analysis of the productivity effects of foreign and domestic r d investments in a large panel of firms based in the netherlands we argue that foreign and domestic r d will exhibit complementarity in their effects on productivity but that the roles of domestic and foreign r d depend on the relative position of the home country with respect to the global technology frontier and the related relative opportunities for knowledge sourcing abroad we estimate a dynamic panel data model derived from a knowledge stock augmented production function framework allowing for productivity convergence and declining returns to r d we confirm that for firms active in industries in which the home country is behind the global technology frontier foreign r d provides positive returns and has a complementary relationship with domestic r d for industries at the global technology frontier in contrast domestic r d is the primary source of productivity growth

competitive pressure and the adoption of complementary innovations liberalization of the european automobile distribution system in 2002 limits the ability of manufacturers to impose vertical restraints leading to a substantial increase in competitive pressure among dealers we estimate an equilibrium model of profit maximization to evaluate how dealers change their innovation adoption strategies following the elimination of exclusive territories using french data we evaluate the existence of complementarities between the adoption of software applications and the scale of production firms view these innovations as substitutes and concentrate their effort in one type of software as they expand their scale of production results are robust to the existence of unobserved heterogeneity

in search of complementarity in innovation strategy internal r d and external knowledge acquisition empirical research on complementarity between organizational design decisions has traditionally focused on the question of existence of complementarity in this paper we take a broader approach to the issue combining a productivity and an adoption approach while including a search for contextual variables in the firms strategy that affects complementarity analysis of contextual variables is not only interesting per se but also improves the productivity test for the existence of complementarity we use our empirical methodology to analyze complementarity between innovation activities internal research and development r d and external knowledge acquisition our results suggest that internal r d and external knowledge acquisition are complementary innovation activities but that the degree of complementarity is sensitive to other elements of the firms strategic environment we identify reliance on basic r dthe importance of universities and research centers as an information source for the innovation processas an important contextual variable affecting complementarity between internal and external innovation activities

internal sequential innovations how does interrelatedness affect patent renewal abstract the value of patented innovations has attracted substantial research attention especially in the context of patent renewal however research often assumes that a firm s patented innovations are independent from each other we draw upon evolutionary economics and suggest that some of a firm s patents share important genealogical relationships which we refer to as internal sequential innovations we propose internal sequential innovations are more valuable and therefore more likely to be renewed than stand alone innovations we examine our hypotheses from a dataset of us pharmaceutical and biotechnology patents the results confirm our hypotheses at both the patent and the firm levels

absorptive capacity coauthoring behavior and the organization of research in drug discovery we examine the interface between for profit and publicly funded research in pharmaceuticals firms access upstream basic research through investments in absorptive capacity in the form of in house basic research and pro publication internal incentives some firms also maintain extensive connections to the wider scientific community which we measure using data on coauthorship of scientific papers between pharmaceutical company scientists and publicly funded researchers connectedness is significantly correlated with firms internal organization as well as their performance in drug discovery the estimated impact of connectedness on private research productivity implies a substantial return to public investments in basic research

internal r d expenditures and external technology sourcing abstract the paper examines the two way relationship between external r d activities and internal r d expenditures on a cross section of flemish r d active companies the analysis extends the classical explanatory variables like size diversification ownership structure and technological opportunities to include the impact of various external sourcing strategies r d cooperation and to a lesser extent r d contracted out are found to have a significant positive effect on internal r d but only if the companies have absorptive capacity in the form of a full time staffed r d department at the same time firms are found to be more frequently engaged in r d cooperation the more they spend on internal r d

real options and foreign affiliate divestments a portfolio perspective this paper develops a real options portfolio perspective on foreign affiliate divestments affiliates are less likely to be divested in response to adverse environmental change if they represent growth or switch option value to the multinational firm under conditions of macroeconomic uncertainty however the affiliate is partially redundant to the option value of the multinational firm s affiliate portfolio if the affiliate shares the manufacturing platform role in the host country with other affiliates or if macroeconomic conditions of the host country are highly correlated with those of other countries in which the multinational firm operates affiliates we find strong support for these arguments in tests on a comprehensive sample of 1078 asian manufacturing affiliates of japanese electronics multinationals

the role of diversification profiles and dyadic characteristics in the formation of technological alliances differences between exploitation and exploration in a low tech industry this paper posits that corporate and technological diversification of firms and their relatedness in terms of products and technologies will impact their propensity to form technological alliances it argues that both higher levels of diversification and greater relatedness signal superior capabilities and available resources to prospective partners that will facilitate exploration and exploitation of technological assets in an alliance these theoretical conjectures are tested using a dataset of all tire producers worldwide between 1985 and 1996 that combines detailed firm data on establishment patenting and alliance activities the results indicate that complementarity in terms of corporate and technological diversification strategies as well as partner characteristics e g size age and technological capabilities drive exploitation alliances moreover firms with similar product portfolios are more likely to engage in exploitative interactions in contrast exploration alliances exhibit strong partner similarity across all firm characteristics both corporate and technological diversification have positive effects on firms propensity to engage in exploration while technological distance has a negative nonlinear one

social rate of return to r d on various energy technologies where should we invest more a study of g7 countries abstract the importance of investment in research and development r d in the energy sector is indisputable especially considering the benefits of new technologies to sustainability security and environmental protection however the nature and potential of various energy technologies that are capable of improving the energy and environmental conditions globally is a challenging task for governments and policy makers that have to make decisions on the allocation of funds in r d to do so the optimal resource allocation to r d should be determined by estimating the social rate of return for r d investments this paper aims to estimate the social rate of return of r d on various energy applications and technologies such as energy efficiency fossil fuels renewable energy sources and nuclear for the g7 countries the results show that primarily r d investment on energy efficiency technologies and nuclear are the ones that yield high social benefits for all g7 countries while exactly the opposite holds for fossil fuels

inventor networks in renewable energies the influence of the policy mix in germany technological change and gains in efficiency of renewable power generation technologies are to a large extent driven by governmental support various policy instruments that can broadly be categorized as technology push demand pull or systemic constitute part of the policy mix for renewable energies our goal is to gain insights into the influence of this policy mix on the intensity and organization of inventive activities for wind power and photovoltaics in germany since the 1980s we examine the effect of different instruments on the size and structure of co inventor networks based on patent data our results indicate notable differences between the technologies the network size for wind power is driven by technology push and systemic instruments while in photovoltaics demand pull is decisive for network growth by and large the instruments complement each other and form a consistent mix of policy instruments the structure of the networks is driven by demand pull for both technologies systemic instruments increase interaction especially in the wind power network and are complementary to demand pull in fostering collaboration