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

an analysis of policy initiatives to promote strategic research partnerships strategic research partnerships srps have become a salient feature of the us national innovation system we provide an overview of srps and examine the antecedents and consequences of centerpiece legislation designed to stimulate the formation of srps the national cooperative research act ncra of 1984 ncra allows firms to disclose their research joint ventures rjvs to the department of justice which enabled them to significantly reduce their exposure to antitrust litigation we estimate an econometric model of trends in rjv filings and find that as intended by the legislation the propensity of firms to engage in rjvs is sensitive to changes in the global competitiveness of us high technology industries more importantly our results suggest that the establishment of the commerce department s advanced technology program which provides financial support to firms that engage in collaborative research projects induced firms to engage in additional privately financed rjvs this is a spillover mechanism that warrants further attention as national innovation systems evolve

endogenous inequality in integrated labor markets with two sided search we consider a market with red and green workers where labels are payoff irrelevant workers may acquire skills skilled workers search for vacancies while firms search for workers a unique symmetric equilibrium exists in which color is irrelevant there are also asymmetric equilibria in which firms search only for green workers more green than red workers acquire skills skilled green workers receive higher wages and the unemployment rate is higher among skilled red workers discrimination between ex ante identical individuals arises in equilibrium and yet firms have perfect information about their workers and strictly prefer to hire minority workers

reinventing public r d patent policy and the commercialization of national laboratory technologies when innovations are heterogeneous it may be advantageous to provide a variety of patents by trading off patent breadth for length it is possible that fees are not needed in the optimal policy we present two examples the first is a quality ladder model in which innovations benefit society directly as well as through their use as building blocks to future inventions and the rate of arrival for the future innovation is unobserved more fertile innovations get more breadth for a shorter time menus may also be useful in the case of horizontal product differentiation copyright 2001 by the rand corporation

technological joint venture formation under the real options approach abstract technological joint ventures as powerful mechanisms to attain innovation have become commonplace firms form tjvs in an effort to access future technological opportunities without losing flexibility in uncertain contexts the real options approach allows the essence of such managerial thinking to be captured although research in this line remains scarce drawing on the real options approach and using an eight year panel of 4050 spanish manufacturing firms we examine under which conditions firms form technological joint ventures we find that a firm s propensity to form technological joint ventures is positively related to its absorptive capacity and to the degree of environmental technological uncertainty and negatively related to the risk of pre emption by rivals and the existence of opportunity costs our study contributes to bridging the gap between finance theory and strategic analysis in addition it shows practitioners the applicability of the real options approach for decision making results suggest that public policies should particularly although not exclusively foster participation of young and small firms in technological joint ventures we also suggest using managerial perceptions as a guide for channeling public grants

sources of productivity growth in the spanish pharmaceutical industry 1994 2000 abstract the spanish pharmaceutical industry underwent an important transformation during the 1990s to survive under the new market conditions labs had to refocus their competitive strategies towards increasing productive efficiency or reinforcing research and development r d activities this paper analyzes the evolution of the productive patterns in a sample of 80 pharmaceutical laboratories that operated in spain from 1994 to 2000 we estimate malmquist productivity indexes and decompose them into four sources of productivity change the results suggest that pure technical efficiency change and the scale change of the technology explain most of the productivity growth observed during the period the contribution of technical change to productivity growth is negligible indicating a poor result from r d activities at least in the groups of small and medium sized labs

patents versus ex post rewards a new look abstract economic studies that aim at comparing the patent system social efficiency versus an ex post reward system rest on an outdated view of patents they assume that firms use the patent system only in order to be granted a short term commercial monopoly rent this assumption is convenient because it allows straightforward comparisons between patents and rewards but it is not confirmed by empirical studies which stress that in many industries most firms use patents as strategic devices to trade technologies and to ease r d collaborations this change leads to rethinking the framework of the patent reward debate

clusters and comparative advantage implications for industrial policy abstract cases of industrial agglomeration or clusters arise in the presence of industry specific and local externalities also called marshallian externalities the standard argument is that such externalities may justify a policy of infant industry protection to allow and encourage clusters to emerge in this paper i explore this carefully and show that different policy implications emerge under a more realistic modeling of clusters in particular rather than distorting prices to promote clusters in advanced sectors that may exhibit strong clustering possibilities countries should focus instead on promoting clustering in current sectors which have revealed to have the strongest comparative advantage import substitution is not a proper way to achieve this

the role of policy instruments in the innovation and diffusion of environmentally friendlier technologies popular claims versus case study experiences abstract moving towards sustainability will require that new environmentally friendlier technologies are developed and widely adopted policy instruments that promote eco efficiency are therefore necessary some claims frequently made in the literature on the relationship between policy instruments and technological development are examined the claims concern regulations environmental taxation and funding of research and development the claims are explored on the basis of empirical evidence from two sectors the pulp and paper industry and the marine engine industry little support was found for some of the claims in some cases even contradictory findings and for some claims the findings differed between the sectors and even within a sector depending on the issue

labor market implications of weak ties 1 introductionmany of us have heard the phrase it s not what you know but who you know while this may not be strictly true approximately one half of workers in the united states do find employment through friends relatives and other social contacts granovetter 1995 further in a seminal paper granovetter 1973 argues that for the purpose of finding jobs it is acquaintances not close friends who are most important in helping individuals find employment he claims that friends whom one knows well are likely to be close in social space close friends know one s other close friends and tend to have social networks similar to each other thus any information held by a given close friend may be obtained from other close friends as well the job information of close friends is often redundant in contrast acquaintances tend to have less similar social networks and know different people from one s close friends granovetter argued that acquaintances also are more likely to have different information about available jobs which makes them valuable job contacts granovetter labeled acquaintances as weak ties as opposed to close friends who are known as strong ties in this article i am defining weak and strong ties as granovetter 1983 did weak ties are acquaintances and strong ties are close friends the important point of these definitions is the idea that on average acquaintances are less likely to know one s other friends than strong ties on average the social network of strong ties has more overlap than the social network of weak ties as i will explain in more detail below the lack of overlap of acquaintances implies that a social network with more weak ties will be larger will have more range than a social network with fewer weak ties since granovetter s article much work has been done by other scholars to validate the importance of weak ties in labor markets by answering two questions first researchers asked whether weak ties are a common source of finding employment these studies have been successful in demonstrating that weak ties are indeed an important source of finding employment for instance in granovetter 1973 of the people finding jobs through referral sources such as friends family and other personal contacts 27 8 use weak ties 16 7 use strong ties and the majority 55 6 use ties of moderate strength in between weak and strong others have replicated the finding that weak ties are a common means of finding employment 1 in summary this line of research has demonstrated that as granovetter claimed weak ties do play an important role in matching workers and jobs second because weak ties appear to be important in locating jobs researchers have asked if the use of weak ties as a job finding method increases income bridges and villemez 1986 marsden and hurlbert 1988 wegener 1991 the findings of these studies suggest that there is little evidence of a relationship between weak ties and income note that the hypothesized link between weak ties and income was not a part of granovetter s hypothesis as he makes clear in granovetter 1983 the present article can be seen as an extension to this second line of questioning in this article i use an example to show that previous methods used to measure the effect of weak ties on income will underestimate the effect if it exists i then provide a new method of estimating the effect of weak ties on income that directly considers the social network of individuals granovetter s idea that weak ties are more likely to provide novel information rests on the idea that weak ties are less likely to overlap than strong ties on average in other words weak ties know a smaller fraction of one s other friends compared with strong ties on average i use this idea to show that less overlap in friendships increases the range of an individual s social network

r d co practice and reverse knowledge integration in multinational firms this paper contributes to the developing literature on the management of distributed innovation in multinational firms we focus on a specific organizational mechanism r d co practice which we believe is an important facilitator of knowledge integration in multinationals with global innovation strategies in our formulation r d co practice joint technical activities between units increases levels of absorptive capacity and social capital among participating units thus increasing the likelihood that they will share knowledge at future time periods we find strong support for this hypothesis through an empirical analysis of reverse subsidiary to headquarters knowledge integration in two sectors automotive and pharmaceuticals over a 21 year period

demand pull and technology push public support for eco innovation the case of the biofuels sector the purpose of this paper is to explore the differentiated impact of demand pull and technology push policies in shaping technological patterns in the biofuels sector the empirical analysis is based on a novel and original database biopat containing patents in the field of biofuels selected using appropriate keywords and classified according to the technological content of the invention our results generally show that technological capabilities and environmental regulation spur innovative activities in the biofuels sector both demand pull and technology push factors are found to be important drivers of innovation in the biofuels sector however technology exploitation activities in first generation technologies are found to be mainly driven by quantity and price based demand pull policies on the contrary the pace of technology exploration efforts in advanced generation biofuels is shown to react positively to price based demand pull incentives but also to technology push policy the clear diversity in the impact of different public support instruments provides new insights which fuel discussion on the optimal policy mix debate and offers new elements for the design of future policy strategies

universities and fundamental research reflections on the growth of university industry partnerships the recent rise in university industry partnerships has stimulated an important public policy debate regarding how these relationships affect fundamental research in this paper we examine the antecedents and consequences of policies to promote university industry alliances although the preliminary evidence appears to suggest that these partnerships have not had a deleterious effect on the quantity and quality of basic research some legitimate concerns have been raised about these activities that require additional analysis we conclude that additional research is needed to provide a more accurate assessment of the optimal level of commercialisation

is public r d a complement or substitute for private r d a review of the econometric evidence is public r d spending complementary and thus additional to private r d spending or does it substitute for and tend to crowd out private r d conflicting answers are given to this question we survey the body of available econometric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years a framework for analysis of the problem is developed to help organize and summarize the findings of econometric studies based on time series and cross section data from various levels of aggregation laboratory firm industry country the findings overall are ambivalent and the existing literature as a whole is subject to the criticism that the nature of the experiment s that the investigators envisage is not adequately specified we conclude by offering suggestions for improving future empirical research on this issue

many roads lead to rome implications of geographic scope as a source of isolating mechanisms studies examining the competitive implications of geographic scope have largely focused on creating competitive advantage in an attempt to investigate a less illuminated role of geographic scope that of sustaining competitive advantage this paper investigates the sources of and relationships among the causal factors leading to creation of isolating mechanisms or barriers to imitation this paper first distinguishes two sources of causal factors linked to the creation of isolating mechanisms intrinsic characteristics of knowledge and geographic scope of knowledge acquisition and then investigates the relationships among the causal factors from the two sources employing the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method this paper examines equifinality and functional equivalence of causal factors from the two sources empirical analyses with united states patent and trademark office patent data of the semiconductor industry corroborate the main thesis of the paper that multiple paths can lead to the creation of isolating mechanisms and in these paths causal factors from the two sources of isolating mechanisms can be functionally equivalent the results also provide managerial implications that firms with different sets of resources and capabilities can implement different types of isolating strategies to sustain their competitive advantage

uncertain intellectual property conditions and knowledge appropriation strategies evidence from the genomics industry innovating science and technology based firms often endure a sustained period of uncertain intellectual property rights ipr protection before patents could be granted to their valuable knowledge assets this problem is exacerbated as firms increasingly develop their innovations or operate in countries with weak ipr institutional environments but how does ipr uncertainty affect firms strategy toward knowledge appropriation capturing of economic value from their knowledge assets and toward providing access to these knowledge assets drawing on research from the economics of science and intellectual property strategy we examine this question using a novel panel data covering 362 firms and organizations in the knowledge intensive genomics industry based on all genomics patents and matching papers from 1988 to 2005 we find that under uncertain ipr conditions firms reveal and accumulate more knowledge through open science follow on publishing but shift to knowledge appropriation through commercial science follow on patenting when ipr uncertainty is narrowed this effect is most salient when firms develop their knowledge assets or operate under strong ipr institutional regime for highly science based knowledge assets firms continue tapping into open science for access and reciprocity in knowledge acquisition from the scientific community these findings highlight the role of patent grant as a potential lever to shape firms knowledge processes and long term innovative capacity and the emergence of a concerted science strategy employed by firms

academic freedom private sector focus and the process of innovation we develop a model that clarifies the respective advantages and disadvantages of academic and private sector research rather than relying on lack of appropriability or spillovers to generate a rationale for academic research we emphasize control rights considerations and argue that the fundamental tradeoff between academia and the private sector is one of creative control versus focus by serving as a precommitment mechanism that allows scientists to freely pursue their own interests academia can be indispensable for early stage research at the same time the private sector s ability to direct scientists toward higher payoff activities makes it more attractive for later stage research

patent citations an analysis of quality differences and citing practices in hybrid corn a growing empirical literature uses patent citations as a quality adjusted measure for innovation despite concerns about the validity of this measure this paper links patents with objective measures of improvements in the quality of patented inventions measured through performance in field trials for hybrid corn to examine three potential factors that influence citations 1 improvements in performance 2 citing practices of patent attorneys and 3 citing practices of patent examiners this analysis reveals that citations are robustly correlated with performance which confirms that citations are a useful quality adjusted measure for innovation the citing practices of patent attorneys and examiners however also influence citations patent attorneys cite early patents which help establish the patentability of an invention this practice may inflate citation counts for early patents particularly for inventions that have only recently become patentable attorneys also add self citations our anal

innovation in multinational subsidiaries the role of knowledge assimilation and subsidiary capabilities subsidiaries of multinational firms play an important role in the globalization of innovation yet we have an incomplete idea of the influences on their innovative activity drawing on prior research in international business and strategy we identify two sets of factors that influence the absorption and utilization of knowledge in multinational corporation subsidiaries a the range of external and internal knowledge sources available and b the subsidiary capabilities associated with knowledge absorption and utilization we find that knowledge absorbed from the host country is useful to subsidiary innovation we also find support for the role of subsidiary capabilities both sourcing capability and combinative capability have a significant influence on the scale and quality of innovation

what makes companies pursue an open science strategy whereas recent scholarly research has provided many insights about universities engaging in commercial activities there is still little empirical evidence regarding the opposite phenomenon of companies disseminating scientific knowledge our paper aims to fill this gap and explores the motivations of firms that disclose research outcomes in a scientific format besides considering a dimension internal to the firm we focus particularly on knowledge sourcing from academic institutions and the appropriability regime we conduct an econometric analysis with firm level data from the fourth edition of the french innovation survey cis and matched scientific publications for a sample of 2512 rd performing firms from all manufacturing sectors this analysis provides evidence that firms are more likely to adopt academic principles if they need to access scientific knowledge that is considered important for their innovation development whereas the mere existence of collaborative links with academic institutions is not a strong determinant furthermore the results suggest that the inclination of firms to publish is sensitive to the level of knowledge spillovers in a sector and the effectiveness of legal appropriation instruments c 2013 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the paradox of weak ties in 55 countries abstract people find jobs through their social networks using ties of different strengths intuitively weak ties might be less useful because people communicate less often with them or more useful because they provide novel information granovetter s early work showed that more job seekers get help via acquaintances than friends granovetter 1973 however recent work on job finding gee et al 2017 shows an apparent paradox of weak ties in the united states most people are helped through one of their numerous weak ties but a single stronger tie is significantly more valuable at the margin although some studies have addressed the importance of weak ties in job finding within specific countries this is the first paper to use a single dataset and methodology to compare the importance of weak ties across countries here we use de identified data from almost 17 million social ties in 55 countries to document the widespread existence of this paradox of weak ties across many societies more people get jobs where their weak ties work however this is not because weak ties are more helpful than strong ties it is because they are more numerous in every country the likelihood of going to work where an individual friend works is increasing not decreasing with tie strength yet there is substantial variation in the added value of a strong tie at the margin across these countries we show that the level of income inequality in a country is positively correlated with the added value of a strong tie so that individual strong ties matter more when there is greater income inequality

positions and rewards the allocation of resources within a science based entrepreneurial firm we study the link between resource allocation and employee publication in the open science in a quantitative case study of one science based entrepreneurial firm we bridge the literature on incentives with that on authority structures to argue that a positive relationship between rewards and productivity will be strongest for individuals in positions of scientific leadership within the firm in a novel dataset we find that prolific publishers receive greater year end bonuses and are allocated additional direct reports but this relationship only holds for individuals in scientific leadership roles these results contribute to our understanding of resource allocation processes and reward structures in science based firms

informal hiring and income in the labor market this note explores the generalizability of the conventional belief that jobs found through weak social ties and through work related social ties provide higher incomes than jobs found through other means data are analyzed from a sample which is representative of a complete cross section of a large metropolitan labor market the results show that zero order relationships generalize in most instances to broadly defined populations however the effectiveness of weakly tied and work related informal contacts becomes greatly diminished when controls are added for measures of worker productivity characteristics

inter firm reverse technology transfer the home country effect of r d internationalization one consequence of the internationalization of rd these results are robust to the exclusion of examiner citations we find that this technology transfer process is explained by the degree of home country embeddedness of the multinational firm the us subsidiaries engagement in asset augmenting activities and the presence of a technology gap between the united states and the home country these results point to an alternative understanding of foreign direct r d investment and its implications for the home country s technological activity and general competitive performance copyright 2009 the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

the size of firms and r d investment we construct an industry equilibrium model in which it is costly for consumers who have previously purchased from one firm to switch to competitors this gives firms a certain degree of market power over their established customers the equilibria we identify under these conditions have the following properties 1 there is a nontrivial size distribution of firms although firms are intrinsically identical 2 larger firms make higher profits 3 larger firms spend more on r d 4 larger firms charge on average lower prices and 5 profits are positively correlated over time these properties match empirical regularities concerning the manufacturing and retail sectors in the u s economy

social capital and finding a job do contacts matter does social capital affect labor market outcomes the prevalent use of job contacts to find work suggests that who you know is an important means of getting a good job network theories of social capital argue that well connected workers benefit because of the job information and influence they receive through their social ties although a number of studies have found a positive relationship between measures of social capital and wages and or occupational prestige little is known about the causal effect of social networks on labor market outcomes four data sets are used to reassess findings on the role of social capital in the labor market a test of causality is proposed based on the argument that if social capital variables do have a causal effect on job outcomes then workers with high levels of social capital should be more likely to use contacts to find work all else being equal results suggest that much of the effect of social capital in the existing literature reflects the tendency for similar people to become friends rather than a causal effect of friends characteristics on labor market outcomes

incentives in university technology transfers there are two main ways in which the knowledge created in universities has been transferred to firms licensing agreements and the creation of spin offs in this paper we describe the main steps in the transfer of university innovations the main incentive issues that appear in this process and the contractual solutions proposed to address them

induced innovation and energy prices this paper uses u s patent data from 1970 to 1994 to study the impact of energy prices on energy efficient innovations theories of technological change have focused both on demand side factors which spur innovative activity by increasing the value of new innovations and supply side factors such as scientific advancements that make new innovations possible data on demand side factors are easily obtained but data on supply side factors that influence innovation are not readily available this paper uses patent citations as a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge citations to previous patents are used to construct productivity estimates which measure the usefulness of the existing stock of knowledge to inventors in a given energy field for any given year these estimates are then combined with data on demand side factors to estimate a model of induced innovation in energy technologies the results indicate that both energy prices and the supply of knowledge have strongly significant positive effects on innovation the paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of this work for environmental policy

job contact networks abstract many workers hear about or obtain their jobs through friends and relatives the aim of this paper is twofold first we relate both individual and aggregate labor market outcomes to the network structure of personal contacts second we study strategic network formation to this purpose we develop a model specifying at the individual level both the decision to form contacts with other agents and the process by which information about jobs is obtained and transmitted we show that equilibrium networks always exist and that only moderate levels of network asymmetry can be sustained at equilibrium also we establish a general non monotonicity result on information flow and unemployment with respect to network size in symmetric networks

social network structure segregation and equality in a labor market with referral hiring abstract we examine the effects of social network structure on inequality in a model of referral hiring that focuses on groups rather than individuals more random social networks yield higher employment rates than less random ones if the population is integrated or job vacancy information flows are random however less random social networks allow for better containment of job information inside a group in a segregated population with non random job information flows resulting in higher employment rates we report on the robustness of these findings with respect to the size of minority and majority groups and the amount of social segregation

the development of china s solar photovoltaic industry why industrial policy failed this article studies china s central local government relations in the formation and implementation of an industry policy in china the central government is responsible for policy formation and the local governments are responsible for policy implementation where local governments are allowed ample flexibility in the ways to achieve the policy mandate this arrangement is conducive to local competition but there is no built in mechanism in the system to regulate such competition the system is defective in the execution of an industrial policy in that it fails to discipline the recipients of policy favours and to make efficient exit selections because local competition involves policy resources as well as economic resources the outcome of competition is not necessarily consistent with the comparative advantage of the region the more that policy is emphasised in industrial development the more that competition tends to favour large and rich cities after a certain period of hands off local competition the timing of which is unpredictable but will come when the industry runs into troubles the central government holds the ultimate power to determine the winners the central government typically picks the large and strong firms as the winners which are crowned as a national team and became eligible for further policy support this institutional set up produces a rapidly growing industry which often results in over capacity but not necessarily a competitive industry i use the case of china s solar photovoltaic industry to illustrate these points

making a marriage of materials the role of gatekeepers and shepherds in the absorption of external knowledge and innovation performance through interviews and a large scale survey of r d scientists and engineers this paper explores individuals attempts to absorb external knowledge focusing on their efforts to identify and assimilate external knowledge and promote its utilization extant research does not explicitly address whether individuals should better specialize in certain absorption efforts or rather work as generalists dedicated to a range of efforts we suggest that assimilation efforts increase the value of individuals efforts at external search and at promoting the utilization of external knowledge which culminates in two main absorption roles that can help individuals achieve greater innovation performance we argue that gatekeepers who combine external search with assimilation effort help to achieve innovation by contributing to building potential absorptive capacity while shepherds who combine assimilation with utilization effort aid innovation by building realized absorptive capacity we find support for these predictions and discuss the implications for research and managerial practice in open innovation

invention and innovation in the chemical industry demand pull or discovery push abstract this paper describes a study of the determinants of the rate direction and scale of inventive and innovative activity in the chemical industry over the period 1830 1980 statistical data are interpreted in the light of case study material in three major sectors dyestuffs plastics and pharmaceuticals theories of technical change and economic growth particularly those of schmookler and schmpeter are examined in relation to this material on the chemical industry the findings suggest that the importance of demand pull and discovery push factors and the validity of schmookler s and schumpeter s theories vary over an industry s life cycle

new pills for poor people empirical evidence after gatt abstract the protection of pharmaceutical innovations is being dramatically extended as much of the developing world introduces patent protection for new drug products this change in intellectual property rights may lead to more research on drugs to address developing country needs we use new survey data from india the results of interviews and measures of research and development r d constructed from a variety of statistical sources to determine trends in the allocation of research to products specific to developing country markets there is some although limited evidence of an increase in the mid to late 1980s which appears to have leveled off in the 1990s the picture presented provides a baseline against which future patterns in research activity can be compared

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

capitalism as an engine of progress economists from marx to schumpeter have touted capitalism as an engine of technical progress but what kind of an engine is it what are its key components how does it work

assessing the effect of public subsidies on firm r d investment a survey this survey examines the empirical literature on the relationship between public r d subsidies and private r d investment over the past five decades the survey reveals a considerable heterogeneity of empirical results that cannot be explained fully by methodological issues we aim to provide further explanations of the possible causes of that heterogeneity in particular we emphasise a set of issues that in our view are critical to understanding the potential effect of public r d subsidies on private r d spending special attention is paid to the dynamic aspects and composition of firm r d the constraints faced by the firm such as financial constraints and the amount and source of public subsidies none of these issues have been investigated in depth we formulate a set of research assumptions to guide future empirical research in this field

evidence from patents and patent citations on the impact of nasa and other federal labs on commercial innovation federal lab commercialization is explored 1 by analyzing us government patents and 2 in a qualitative analysis of one nasa lab s patents tests apply to three distinct sets of patents 1963 94 nasa all other us government and a random sample of all us inventors patents the federal patenting rate plummeted in the 1970s consistent with increasing commercialization both nasa s and other federal agencies rates recovered in the 1980s the case study finds citations to be a valid but noisy measure of technology spillovers excluding spurious cites two thirds of cites to patents of nasa lewis electro physics branch were evaluated as involving spillovers

decoding the adaptability rigidity puzzle evidence from pharmaceutical incumbents pursuit of gene therapy and monoclonal antibodies the emergence of radical technologies presents a significant challenge to incumbent firms we study firms management of radical technological change by separating their actions into upstream research the r of r d and downstream development the d of r d we introduce two contingencies to explain when incumbents research investments in radical technologies translate into product development and when these upstream investments may get voided by organizational inertia downstream first radical technologies can differ in how they conform to incumbents existing business models impacting the extent to which the movement of research outputs toward development will be subject to inertial pressures second incumbents can invest in a radical technology through a variety of modes internal research external research contracts alliances acquisitions these modes represent unique combinations of who does research and who is involved in the decision for subsequent development and hence differ in the extent to which they are shielded from inertial pressures this difference helps explain why incumbents despite responding to radical technologies may still be unable to adapt as well as what types of investments will be more effective in helping firms navigate technological change evidence from pharmaceutical incumbents pursuit of monoclonal antibodies and gene therapy offers strong support for our arguments

the effects of social networks on employment and inequality we develop a model where agents obtain information about job opportunities through an explicitly modeled network of social contacts we show that employment is positively correlated across time and agents moreover unemployment exhibits duration dependence the probability of obtaining a job decreases in the length of time that an agent has been unemployed finally we examine inequality between two groups if staying in the labor market is costly and one group starts with a worse employment status then that group s drop out rate will be higher and their employment prospects will be persistently below that of the other group

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

search method use by unemployed youth this article presents a search model which shows that search method choices should be related to their costs and expected productivities as well as to nonwage income and wage offer distributions the empirical evidence then shows that the most frequently used search methods i e friends and relatives and direct applications without referral are also the most productive in generating offers and acceptances the number of methods used is affected by factors that presumably reflect opportunities as well as income sources and needs specific methods are chosen in a manner that generates positive average effects on outcomes for those using them

who participates in r d subsidy programs the case of spanish manufacturing firms abstract empirical evidence on the effectiveness of r d subsidies to firms has produced mixed results so far one possible explanation is that firms and project selection rules may be quite heterogeneous both across agencies and across industries leading to different outcomes in terms of the induced additional private effort here we focus on the participation stage using a sample of spanish firms we test for differences across agencies and industries our results suggest that firms in the same industry face different hurdles to participate in different agencies programs that participation patterns may reflect a combination of agency goals and that patterns differ across high tech and low tech industries

the technological origins of radical inventions this paper aims to trace down the origins of radical inventions in spite of many theoretical discussions on the effect of radical inventions the specific nature of radical inventions has received much less attention in the theoretical and empirical literature we try to fill that void by an empirical investigation into the specific origins of radical inventions we explore this issue by a close examination of 157 individual patents which are selected from a pool of more than 300 000 patents in contrast to the conventional wisdom that radical inventions are based less on existing knowledge we find that they are to a higher degree based on existing knowledge than non radical inventions a further result that follows from our analysis is that radical inventions are induced by the recombination over more knowledge domains the combination of knowledge from domains that might usually not be connected seems to deliver more radical inventions

job search and network composition implications of the strength of weak ties hypothesis workers find jobs through personal contacts weak and strong ties and formal sources alternative formulations of the strength of weak ties hypothesis suggest 1 weak ties relay job offers more frequently than strong ties or 2 weak tie offers are drawn from a better distribution a formal model shows that both formulations imply a correlation between network composition and a job seeker s minimum acceptable wage however the use of a weak tie is never associated with higher expected wages under the firstformulation and is only sometimes associated with higher expected wages under the secondformulation these results suggest that researchers shouldfocus on job seekers network structures

different missions and commitment power in r d organizations theory and evidence on industry university alliances this paper proposes a theory for why firms conduct some research activities in house but outsource other projects to independent partners and for why firms retain different degrees of control over collaborative research projects the focus is on the determinants of a company s choice to outsource research projects to academic organizations because of the different institutional missions of academic organizations outsourcing a project to a university allows a firm to commit not to terminate or alter a scientifically valuable project before it is complete this commitment is potentially valuable for the firm in an environment where scientific value and economic value may not coincide and scientific workers are responsive to the incentives defined by their community of peers an economic model that formalizes these arguments is developed empirical hypotheses are then formulated about the kind of research activities firms will outsource to universities and activities on which they will exert stronger control evidence from a sample of industry university research agreements as well as from other large sample and case studies shows patterns consistent with the predictions of the model

how firms innovate through r d internationalization an s curve hypothesis abstract this article examines the effects of r d internationalization and organizational slack on innovation performance we suggest that there is an s shaped relationship between r d internationalization and innovation performance innovation performance increases in the decentralization stage decreases in the transition stage and increases again in the recentralization stage in addition organizational slack is hypothesized to have a negative moderating effect on the s shaped relationship longitudinal data on 210 taiwanese firms in the information technology sector during a 10 year period is collected to test the hypotheses the findings support our prediction managerial implications and future research directions are discussed

public support for innovation and the openness of firms innovation activities this study explores empirically the relationship between publicly funded schemes to support innovation and the openness of firms innovation practices using survey data from more than 5000 firms in 29 european countries we find that support policies for innovation both monetary and non monetary are related to an increase in the degree of openness of individual firms both in terms of the number of external partners with whom they collaborate and the number of open innovation activities they perform however the relationship between support and openness seems to be negatively moderated by the existence of previous innovative activity within the firm public support has more impact on less innovative firms and less influence when the firm is already innovative which could potentially indicate the existence of crowding out effects additionally our results suggest that non financial support is more strongly linked to openness than financial support for policy makers facing salient budgetary constraints this implies that institutions and government policies could potentially play a more important role than money in fostering open innovation this article contributes to the open innovation literature by tapping into the underexplored question of the role of public policies and has crucial implications for academics and policy makers

measuring patent s influence on technological evolution a study of knowledge spanning and subsequent inventive activity we introduce technological influence as a variable to measure an invention s direct and indirect impact on the evolution of technology this provides a novel means to study the short and long run effect of invention antecedents on technological evolution invention activity and economic growth a comparison between models of technological influence and direct technological impact is presented model estimations are based on data from semiconductor patents granted over a 5 year period results from quantile regression estimations show significant differences in the relationships between antecedents of technological influence and impact for example pioneering the spanning of knowledge boundaries has a positive relationship with the patent s influence while no relationship is found with direct citations these results have important implications for public policy and the management of technology they suggest the need for deeper understanding of the micro foundations of the technological evolution process and raise the question of whether inventors under current ip protection receive adequate economic incentives to promote actions driving economic growth

how does china s industrial policy affect firms r d investment evidence from china manufacturing 2025 aimed at improving innovation capacity and upgrading technology of manufacturing industry china manufacturing 2025 cm2025 which relies on selective industrial policies has attracted great at

changes in university patent quality after the bayh dole act a re examination abstract the bayh dole act of 1980 facilitated the retention by universities of patent rights resulting from government funded academic research thus encouraging university entry into patenting and licensing though the act is widely recognized to be a major change in federal policy towards academic research surprisingly little empirical analysis has been directed at assessing its impacts on the academy and on university industry research relationships an important exception is the work of henderson et al rev econ stat 80 1998 119 127 which examined the impact of bayh dole on the quality of university patents as measured by the number of times they are cited in subsequent patents the authors found that the quality of academic patents declined dramatically after bayh dole a finding that has potentially important policy implications in this paper we revisit this influential finding by using a longer stream of patent citations data we show that the results of the henderson et al study reflect changes in the intertemporal distribution of citations to university patents rather than a significant change in the total number of citations these patents eventually receive this has important implications not only for the evaluation of bayh dole but also for future research using patent citations as economic indicators

getting competition down to a science the effects of technological competition on firms scientific publications prior research about the interaction between private firms and the scientific community has largely viewed firms articles in scientific publications as a means to improve research and development productivity by encouraging their researchers to publish scientific papers firms can maintain linkages with the scientific community attract talent and access external knowledge on which they can build to create innovations this paper in contrast emphasizes the role of scientific publications in firms battles for market dominance and examines how competitive conditions shape firms propensities to publish scientific articles about their innovations focusing on the context of pharmaceutical drugs we develop propositions about how the competition that one drug faces from similar drugs and potential substitutes influences the innovating firm s inclination to publish articles in the top medical journals about that drug to facilitate its assessment by the u s food and drug administration and the medical community we also propose that scientific articles about competing drugs compel a firm to highlight its own drug in scientific papers to assert the drug s uniqueness and mitigate the threat of substitution whereas prior research has elucidated how science contributes to enhancing firms competence at creating innovations which is critical to their ability to compete in technology intensive environments this paper draws attention to how competition in turn permeates into the scientific arena creating inducements for firms to use scientific publications to position their innovations in the marketplace