This paper will show how the UK banks learnt the strategic value of retaining IT expertise in-house through their experience of the design of EFTPOS networks. The banks began by attempting to 'buy-in' IT expertise from other organisations, but they were first compelled to locate expertise in a...

Comparison of time series data for developed European furniture industries shows that only in the 1950s did the Danish furniture industry experience extraordinary growth. The plausible causes of that growth are state-subsidised export marketing of Danish design in the US and post-War...

A current refrain in patent policy discourse is that “overly-broad” patents of “dubious validity” retard innovation. We briefly review expressions of the thesis to show that they reduce to the allegation that disagreements over enforceable patent scope and/or validity harm innovation....

Designing around patents is prevalent but not often appreciated as a means by which patents promote economic development through competition. We provide a novel detailed empirical study of the extent and timing of designing around patent claims. We study the filing rate of incandescent...

This paper examines the working definitions of the term 'technology' across a range of disciplines such as industrial relations, organisational behaviour, operations management and development economics. The precise 'subdefinition' of technology in use depends on the disciplinary problematic. We...

This paper revisits the quot;what causes innovation - market pull or technology push?quot; debate to argue that the conceptualisation is flawed and that the firm is the only quot;agentquot; capable of innovative action. The paper differentiates between quot;usequot;, quot;needquot; and...

We provide a critique of the development in organisation studies of the idea of lsquo;unlearning' as allegedly imported from the psychology literature by Hedberg and understood to mean the manageable discard of knowledge precedent to and aiding later learning. We re-review the psychology...

This article investigates whether firms react to a radical technological substitution threat by a deliberate acceleration of innovation in their existing technology - the 'sailing ship effect'. There have been repeated claims that the effect has been significant as a source of innovation...

This paper will argue that case studies in innovation research at the level of the firm require an explicit model of how people think and act in organisations. The 'socio-cognitive' approach which is outlined here combines Weick's social psychological ideas with Teece's characterisation of the...

The prevailing historical accounts of the formation of the US aircraft “patent pool” in 1917 assume the US government necessarily intervened to alleviate a patent hold-up among private aircraft manufacturers. We show these accounts to be inconsistent with the historical facts. We show that...