modeling technology adoptions for sustainable development under increasing returns uncertainty and heterogeneous agents abstract this paper presents a stylized model of technology adoptions for sustainable development under the three potentially most important stylized facts increasing returns to adoption uncertainty and heterogeneous agents following diverse technology development and adoption strategies the stylized model deals with three technologies and two heterogeneous agents a risk taking one and a risk averse one interactions between the two agents include trade in resources and goods and technological spillover free riding and technology trade with the two heterogeneous agents we run optimizations to minimize their aggregated costs in order to find out what rational behaviors are under different assumptions if the two agents are somehow cooperative by considering uncertain carbon taxes the model also addresses environmental issues as potential driving forces for technology adoptions

corporate governance and the systemic risk a test of bundling hypothesis abstract we provide new evidence that the systemic risk of large banks is higher when the external and internal corporate governance mechanisms complement each other using a sample of large european banks from 2000 to 2016 we examine the relationship between various internal and external corporate governance mechanisms and the level of systemic risk specifically we analyze how monitoring by institutional investors complements or substitutes various board level governance mechanisms in determining systemic risk of a bank our empirical findings show that external institutional ownership and internal board level governance mechanisms complement each other to determine the level of systemic risk of a sample of domestic systemically important banks our results are robust to the alternative systemic risk measures and additional controls we conclude that banks have strategic flexibility in terms of configuring their corporate governance structures to attain similar levels of systemic risk

regional innovation systems theory empirics and policy asheim b t lawton smith h and oughton c regional innovation systems theory empirics and policy regional studies interest in regional innovation systems has grown significantly over the past three decades driven partly by advances in theoretical analysis partly by the growing interest in innovation as a source of competitive advantage and partly by the need for new policies to address regional inequalities and divergence this article explores the elements and characteristics that exemplify the regional innovation systems approach it provides an appraisal and synthesis of the regional innovation systems paradigm and aims to shed light on a number of areas where theoretical empirical and policy based questions remain unanswered it outlines and assesses the major strands in recent theoretical and empirical debates and discusses how they might be developed to contribute to the further advancement of the regional innovation systems literature three interrelated questions form the key themes arou

optimizing systematic technology adoption with heterogeneous agents the traditional operational optimization models of systematic technology adoption commonly assume the existence of a global social planner and ignore the existence of heterogeneous decision makers who interact with each other this paper develops a stylized or conceptual optimization model of systematic technology adoption with heterogeneous agents i e decision makers and uncertain technological learning each agent attempts to identify optimal solutions to adopting technologies for a portion of the entire system the agents in the model have different foresight and different risk attitudes and interact with one another in terms of technological spillover this paper first illustrates that although a well recalibrated representative model can perform well enough when the interest is placed on aggregate variables it could react to a policy a carbon tax in this paper differently from the multi agent model then this paper explores how the agents heterogeneities and interactions affect the optimal solutions of systematic technology adoption the main findings of the study are that 1 the existence of multiple agents implies a slower adoption of advanced technologies in the entire system than assuming the existence of a global social planner 2 with homogeneous agents technological spillover tends to enhance the lock in effect on previous technologies and 3 with heterogeneous agents even a small technological spillover rate can significantly accelerate the adoption of the advanced technology

complements and substitutes in profiting from innovation a choice experimental approach the ability of firms to effectively use mechanisms that support them in profiting from technological innovation is key to outperforming competitors yet such mechanisms have for the most part been studied in isolation without accounting for interactions between them we address this gap by developing a conjoint based method to study such interactions and by applying it to analyze interactions between product related patents and three other appropriability mechanisms to this end we conduct and analyze a series of discrete choice experiments with 319 managers within a leading international communications equipment company as a result we find the number of product related patents to be complementary to the overall size of the patent portfolio and complementary with an interesting exception to contributions to open standards we also find indications of a substitutive interaction with lead time advantages hence the effectiveness of patents seems to be leveraged by controlled diffusion of the underlying technologies and by the size of the firm s patent portfolio a finding that may contribute to explaining the patent paradox theoretical and managerial implications are discussed

innovation and cooperation in the small firm sector evidence from northern britain freel m s and harrison r t 2006 innovation and cooperation in the small firm sector evidence from northern britain regional studies 40 289 305 over the last 20 years network based models of innovation led economic development have grown increasingly popular to both the polity and the academy in contrast to earlier linear conceptions innovation is viewed as a systemic phenomenon in which interactive learning and cooperative entrepreneurship are fundamental the way that systems and in turn networks are usually defined is by the volume and characteristics of the linkages that bind them together accordingly drawing upon a recent survey of small firms in scotland and northern england 1347 responses the paper is concerned with mapping the extent of small firm innovation related networking and understanding the unique contribution such networks make to the successful introduction of new products and processes importantly it investigated the impact of networking on innovation in both manu

balancing search and stability interdependencies among elements of organizational design we examine how and why elements of organizational design depend on one another an agent based simulation allows us to model three design elements and two contextual variables that have rarely been analyzed jointly a vertical hierarchy that reviews proposals from subordinates an incentive system that rewards subordinates for departmental or firm wide performance the decomposition of an organization s many decisions into departments the underlying pattern of interactions among decisions and limits on the ability of managers to process information interdependencies arise among these features because of a basic general tension to be successful an organization must broadly search for good sets of decisions but it must also stabilize around good decisions once discovered an effective organization balances search and stability we identify sets of design elements that encourage broad search and others that promote stability the adoption of elements that encourage broad search typically raises the marginal benefit of other elements that provide offsetting stability hence the need to balance search and stability generates interdependencies among the design elements we pay special attention to interdependencies that involve the vertical hierarchy our findings confirm many aspects of conventional wisdom about vertical hierarchies but challenge or put boundary conditions on others we place limits for instance on the received wisdom that firm wide incentives and capable subordinates make top level oversight less valuable we also identify circumstances in which vertical hierarchies can lead to inferior long term performance

inter firm network policies and firm performance evaluating the impact of initiatives in the united kingdom abstract this paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of inter firm networks as a public policy resource that has necessarily required experimentation and adaptation the focus of the paper is an evaluation of public policy network initiatives in the united kingdom from the point of view of the companies participating in these initiatives the study finds that inter firm network initiatives have faced a number of problems resulting in the level of inter firm interaction being generally fairly low and unintensive this has severely limited the number of firms that have benefited from participation as well as the overall impact on firm performance and growth more positively it is shown that the initiatives have resulted in substantial gains for albeit a small number of participating companies the small number of companies achieving substantial benefits were most often those involved in initiatives that were able to formalise sustainable networks the key policy problem is that this situation has occurred in only a very restricted number of circumstances with formal network initiatives being subject to extremely high drop out rates it is suggested that policies aimed at formal network initiatives should be abandoned as a mechanism for creating a critical mass of sustainable networks instead the progression of policy models based on informal initiatives appears to offer the most plausible means of catalysing inter company contact

interfirm learning in environmental safety evidence from the bakken this paper examines whether firm learning economies lead to reduced environmental incidents in bakken unconventional oil drilling we model the relationship between environmental safety and learnin

long run effects of public private research joint ventures the case of the danish innovation consortia support scheme subsidized research joint ventures rjvs between public research institutions and industry have become increasingly popular in europe and the us we study the long run effects of such a support scheme that has been maintained by the danish government since 1995 to cope with identification problems we apply nearest neighbor matching and conditional difference in difference estimation methods our main findings are that i program participation effects are instant for annual patent applications and last for three years ii employment effects materialize first after one year and iii there are no statistically significant effects on value added or labor productivity we further show that these overall results are primarily driven by firms that were patent active prior to joining the rjv and that there are no statistically significant effects for large firms the insignificant results we document for large firms coupled with the fact that these type of firms are over represented in many support programs including the one considered here leads us to suggest a rethinking of support policies that often aim at large firms

institutional barriers to associative city region governance the politics of institution building and economic governance in canada s technology triangle it has been argued that collaborative and associative forms of governance can enhance the economic competitiveness of cities and regions institutionalist approaches to urban and regional economic

endogenous matching and the empirical determinants of contract form empirical work on contracts typically regresses contract choice on observed principal and agent characteristics if i some of these characteristics are unobserved or partially observed and ii there are incentives whereby particular types of agents end up contracting with particular types of principals estimated coefficients on the observed characteristics may be misleading we address this endogenous matching problem using a data set on agricultural contracts between landlords and tenants in early renaissance tuscany controlling for endogenous matching has an impact on parameters of interest and tenants risk aversion appears to have influenced contract choice

does cooperation enhance competitiveness assessing the impacts of inter firm collaboration abstract collaboration among small and medium sized enterprises smes is an emerging approach to industrial competitiveness since first noted in western europe governments agencies and private foundations have experimented with policies to stimulate and accelerate forms of inter firm collaboration commonly called manufacturing networks the assumption behind such policies is that cooperative behavior will help smes firms compete and therefore the goal is to alter the behavior of enterprises and to facilitate co operation these strategies are part of an emerging national effort to stimulate industrial modernization through a variety of interventions state legislatures and government agencies being asked to invest in network initiatives want to know whether they are meeting their goals and what impacts they are having on their state regional and national economies while investments small in scale expectations are high this article draws on two evaluations of network initiatives one sponsored by a state and one by a private foundation to discuss issues methodologies evidence of impacts and challenges the first evaluation requested by for the oregon economic development department occurred at an early stage in the process and therefore was limited to the process and early industry responses the second requested by the northwest area foundation was over the 3 year grant period and also included some measures of change among participating smes both however illustrate the difficulties in trying to attribute bottom line changes in a business and economic changes in an economy to relatively small and indirect interventions and the need for additional research on measures and methodologies

the impact of classes of innovators on technology financial fragility and economic growth in this article we study innovation processes and technological change in an agent based model by including a behavioral switching among heterogeneous innovative firms the model is able to replicate via simulations well known industrial dynamic and growth type stylized facts the main original element of the model is that firms are allowed to endogenously change among three different classes namely single innovators collaborative innovators and imitators moreover our analysis focuses on the impact of these three innovation categories on micro meso and macro aggregates we find that collaborative companies are those having the highest positive impact on the economic system furthermore we have paid particular attention to the role of credit market in promoting smart growth for this purpose we analyze the role of banks as sources of external funds for innovative entrepreneurs our results suggest a trade off between short term profit maximization and long term efficiency which prevents banks to foster investment in r d and technological progress the model is then used to study the effect that different innovation policies have on macroeconomic performance

scope and patterns of innovation cooperation in spanish service enterprises abstract examining 2148 innovating service firms from the spanish technological innovation panel 2004 this paper utilizes latent class analysis to appraise the scope of innovation cooperation in services in the spanish economy in accordance with the growing weight of external information flows throughout innovation processes the empirical evidence indicates that the nature of the service activity affects both the partner chosen and the cooperation intensity the results lead to the creation of a typology of cooperation composed of three broad profiles service firms intensive in techno scientific cooperation intensive in interactions with clients and a profile with low intensity in cooperation called lonely innovators the probability that a firm belongs to the latter profile is 59 which makes it reasonable to affirm that innovation cooperation is not a common practice in spanish innovating service enterprises innovation output variables have been included in order to examine the relationship between patterns of cooperation and innovation performance the findings also underline the co existence of different cooperation patterns within the same industry

learning by drilling interfirm learning and relationship persistence in the texas oilpatch author s kellogg ryan m abstract production in many industries such as construction and heavy manufacturing relies on inputs from both lead firms and contractors these firms joint productivity often hinges on their ability to share information and coordinate activities suggesting that they have strong incentives to learn about each other s personnel procedures and expertise this learning differs from standard learning by doing in that it is relationship specific its benefits are not appropriable outside the relationship in which the learning takes place in this paper i empirically examine the importance of relationship specific learning using high frequency data from oil and gas drilling i find that the joint productivity of a lead firm and its drilling contractor is enhanced significantly as they accumulate experience working together this result is robust to other relationship specificities i also find that firms appear to recognize the benefits of joint experience controlling for other specificities lead firms are more likely to work with contractors with which they have substantial prior experience than those with which they have worked relatively little

networks and small business growth an explanatory model to date there has been limited empirical research related to network theory with this article we have tried to fill this gap by testing an explanatory model of the impact of networks on small business growth to analyze this causal relationship the log linear technique was used the results suggest that networks have an influence on the growth of a small business especially through contacts with national and international entrepreneurs

evidence on how academics manage their portfolio of knowledge transfer activities abstract the purpose of this paper is to explore whether six broad categories of knowledge transfer activities undertaken by academics the creation and diffusion of knowledge through publications transmission of knowledge through teaching informal knowledge transfer patenting spin off formation and consulting activities are complementary substitute or independent as well as the conditions under which complementarities substitution and independence among these activities are likely to emerge this investigation relied on data regarding 1554 researchers funded by the natural sciences and engineering research council of canada contrary to prior studies which have examined complementarities and the determinants of knowledge transfer activities in separate models this study relied on a multivariate path model to reflect the fact that in practice academics consider simultaneously whether or not to undertake multiple knowledge transfer activities overall the results point to the existence of three very different types of knowledge transfer portfolios of activities a first portfolio made up of complementary activities which are interdependent and reinforce each other this portfolio includes publications patenting spin off creation consulting and informal knowledge transfer a second portfolio includes teaching activities and publication outputs which are substitute for each other a third portfolio comprises teaching activities and other activities independent from teaching namely patenting spin off creation consulting and informal knowledge transfer each of these three portfolios of knowledge transfer activities emerged under different conditions implications are derived for managerial practice and future research

misperceiving interactions among complements and substitutes organizational consequences systems composed of activity choices that interact in nonsimple ways can allow firms to create and sustain a competitive advantage however in complex systems decision makers may not always have a precise understanding of the exact strength of the interaction between activities likewise incentive and accounting systems may lead decision makers to ignore or misperceive interactions this paper studies formally the consequences of misperceiving interaction effects between activity choices our results suggest that misperceptions with respect to complements are more costly than with respect to substitutes as a result firms should optimally invest more to gather information about interactions among complementary activities e g concerning network effects than about interactions among substitute activities similarly the use of division based incentive schemes appears to be more advisable for divisions whose products are substitutes than for divisions that produce complements it is further shown that system fragility is not necessarily positively correlated with the strength ofthe interaction between choices while systems of complements become increasingly fragile as the strength of interaction increases systems of substitutes can become increasingly stable

cooperative ties and the impact of external factors upon innovation in an industrial district some insights from the north staffordshire table and giftware sector tomlinson p r and jackson i cooperative ties and the impact of external factors upon innovation in an industrial district some insights from the north staffordshire table and giftware sector regional studies drawing upon a sample of 118 firms this paper explores the impact of cooperative ties and the role of institutions upon innovation in the uk ceramic table and giftware sector it is found that locational economies are important for aiding innovation with firms in the north staffordshire industrial district holding an inherent advantage vis a vis non district firms however while close vertical ties enhance innovation recent concerns have arisen that horizontal collaboration between district and asian firms is having a detrimental impact upon innovative capacity within the district finally institutions also appear to play an important role in facilitating the innovation process tomlinson p r and jackson i 118

innovation in firms as the firm is the central mechanism for converting innovation into economic action this paper argues that economists and economic policy makers need to understand how and why firms innovate this is challenging because innovation manifests itself in a wide range of forms and results from diverse organizational processes the paper discusses a number of the practices supporting innovation in firms including positioning connecting protecting organizing and measuring a number of theories explaining innovation in firms are discussed the paper concludes that the determination of the most effective policy levers for encouraging innovation requires staying abreast of current and emerging innovation practices in firms

technological revolutions and techno economic paradigms this paper locates the notion of technological revolutions in the neo schumpeterian effort to understand innovation and to identify the regularities continuities and discontinuities in the process of innovation it looks at the micro and meso foundations of the patterns observed in the evolution of technical change and at the interrelations with the context that shape the rhythm and direction of innovation on this basis it defines technological revolutions examines their structure and the role that they play in rejuvenating the whole economy through the application of the accompanying techno economic paradigm this over arching meta paradigm or shared best practice common sense is in turn defined and analysed in its components and its impact including its influence on institutional and social change

a critical assessment of the evaluation of eu interventions for innovation in the sme sector in wales in this paper the eu structural fund intervention framework is critically assessed in an effort to reflect on the problems faced by policy makers when trying to make sense of the complexity associ

the national system of innovation in historical perspective contrary to some recent work on so called globalisation this paper argues that national and regional systems of innovation remain an essential domain of economic analysis their importance derives from the networks of relationships which are necessary for any firm to innovate whilst external international connections are certainly of growing importance the influence of the national education system industrial relations technical and scientific institutions government policies cul tural traditions and many other national institutions is fundamental the historical examples of germany japan and the former ussr illustrate this point as well as the more recent contrast between east asian and latin american countries introduction the national system of friedrich list according to this author s recollections the first person to use the expression national system of innovation was bengt ake lundvall and he is also the editor of a highly original and thought provoking book 1992 on this subject however as he and his colleagues would be the first to agree and as lundvall himself points out the idea actually goes back at least to friedrich list s conception of the national system of political economy 1841 which might just as well have been called the national system of innovation the main concern of list was with the problem of germany overtaking england and for underdeveloped countries as germany then was in relation to england he advocated not only protection of infant industries but a broad range of policies designed to accelerate or to make possible industrialisation and economic growth most of these policies were concerned with learning about new technology and applying it the racialist and colonialist overtones of the book were in strong contrast to the inter nationalist cosmopolitan approach of the classical free trade economists and list s belief that holland and denmark should join the german bund and acquire german nationality because of their descent and whole character reads somewhat strangely in the european community of today nevertheless despite these unattractive features of his outlook he clearly anticipated many contemporary theories after reviewing the changing ideas of economists about development in the years since the second world war the world bank 1991 concludes that it is intangible investment in knowledge accumulation which is decisive rather than physical capital investment as was at one time believed pages 33 35 the report cites the new growth theory

choice interactions and business strategy choice settings are strategic to the extent that they entail cross sectional or intertemporal linkages these same factors may impose daunting demands on decision makers we develop a graph theoretic generalization of the nk model of fitness landscapes to model the way in which policy choices may be more or less strategic we use this structure to examine through simulation how fully articulated a strategy or set of policy choices must be to achieve a high level of performance and how feasible it is to offset past strategic mistakes through tactical adjustments instead of alignment our analysis highlights the role of asymmetry in the interaction of strategic choices and in particular the degree to which choices vary in terms of being influential dependent or autonomous from other choices

positive and negative feedback in consequential life cycle assessment abstract in this paper we develop a typology of consequences that can be used for environmental assessments of investment in technologies as an illustration we estimate how the inclusion of different cause effect chains could affect the estimated greenhouse gas emissions resulting from buying and using a fuel cell bus today in contrast to earlier studies we include cause effect chains containing positive feedback from adoption e g economies of scale and learning we discuss how our findings affect the usefulness and limitations of consequential life cycle assessment lca and how lca methodology in more general can be used to support strategic technology choice a major conclusion is that environmental assessments of investment in emerging technologies should not only include effects resulting from marginal change of the current system but also marginal contributions to radical system change

monotone comparative statics under uncertainty this paper analyzes monotone comparative statics predictions in several classes of stochastic optimization problems the main results characterize necessary and sufficient conditions for comparative statics predictions to hold based on properties of primitive functions that is utility functions and probability distributions the results apply when the primitives satisfy one of the following two properties i a single crossing property which arises in applications such as portfolio investment problems and auctions or ii log supermodularity which arises in the analysis of demand functions affiliated random variables stochastic orders and orders over risk aversion

choosing between risky prospects the characterization of comparative statics results and location independent risk we consider expected utility maximizers choosing from a family of risky prospects and examine how choice is influenced by the decision makers attitude to risk if the family of risky prospects can be ordered so that as decision makers are more risk tolerant they choose a gamble higher in the ordering then it is natural to say that the family of risky prospects admit a comparative static result the paper characterizes when comparative static results of this sort exist an application is to propose a criterion of location independent riskiness

financial innovation in the uk this study employs a national survey of over 1100 british financial firms to ascertain the determinants of financial innovation and their sales success using the logit and the generalized tobit models we find that the likelihood of financial innovation rises with the size of financial firms employee education greater expenditure on research and development the availability of finance and the extent to which firms cooperate with each other perceptions of economic risk and innovation costs are also influential r d cooperation and human capital are the main variables driving the success of financial innovation measured by the percentage share of innovations sold firms in london the south have a significantly greater tendency to innovate though scotland also does well stock broking fund management and related activities are more innovative than firms in the financial intermediation and pension insurance sectors

the economics of technical change this paper reviews the recent rapidly growing literature on technical change in the economy it concentrates on innovations and their diffusion at firm and industry level since this was the area designated as relatively weak in earlier literature surveys the review argues that the extensive empirical evidence and theoretical analysis now available presents a basic challenge to neoclassical theory after indicating some weaknesses in the neo schumpeterian literature the paper concludes by advocating an experiment with a new form of assessment by neighboring disciplines to economics itself which would take full account of the fundamental issues at stake in this modern methodenstreit c 1994 academic press inc copyright 1994 by oxford university press

r versus d estimating the differentiated effect of research and development on innovation results r d is considered to be the main source of innovation we argue that r d is too broad a measure including activities differing in purposes culture people management and other features however empirical studies have not analyzed them separately mainly due to the lack of data using firm level data the aim of this paper is to estimate the differentiated effect of research and development on different innovation outputs results show that both research and development activities are important however we find that development activities are more important for product innovation while the effect of research activities is higher on process innovation moreover we analyze differences by technological intensity of the sector when analyzing product and process innovations we find evidence supporting the existence of higher payoffs to development and especially to research in low tech sectors when compared with high tech ones

technical change growth and trade new departures in institutional economics this article analyses the main theoretical and policy issues emerging from the literature on the evolutionary institutional economics of technical change the four distinguishing characteristics of which are that technology is often proprietary in nature only a part of knowledge is codifiable in handbooks blueprints patents and so on there are fundamental variations in the above two points across different technological fields and the evolution of knowledge is highly path dependent