Building on the notion of general and specific human capital proposed by Becker (1962), the paper highlights the importance of employee training practices undertaken in firms as an important tool for human resource and knowledge management and focuses on the role of works councils as a specific...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects of knowledge management on the innovation success of firms in Germany. Using a matching procedure on data from the German Innovation Survey of 2003 (“Mannheim Innovation Panel”), we pair firms applying knowledge management with twin firms with...

We investigate the role played by different fields of academic knowledge and various types of higher education institutions in the emergence of innovative start-ups in a region. We show that education and research in the applied and natural sciences have the strongest effect on the emergence of...

Various forms of interaction during the process of research and innovation constitute a global network of knowledge generation and diffusion. Countries and their research organizations and individual scientists need to be embedded in this network to participate in global knowledge ows and to...

Cluster policies aim at improving collaboration between co-located actors to address systemic failures. As yet, cluster policy evaluations are mainly concerned with effects on firm performance. Some recent studies move to the system level by assessing how the structure of actor-based knowledge...

The concept of Bridging Technologies (BTs) refers to technologies which are important for the regional knowledge base by connecting different fields and thereby enabling technological development. We provide analytical tools to identify BTs and study their evolution over time. We apply these...

The development of inventor networks is characterized by the addition of a significant number of new inventors, while a considerable number of incumbent inventors discontinue. We estimate the persistence of knowledge in regional inventor networks using alternative assumptions about knowledge...

The value of social network analysis is critically dependent on the comprehensive and reliable identification of actors and their relationships. We compare regional knowledge networks based on different types of data sources, namely, co-patents, co-publications, and publicly subsidized...