Local research units, this article argues, play a very important role for the scientific field they belong to, for example by mobilizing financial support, offering job opportunities, attracting talented recruits, and providing adequate training. Little is known, however, about such units, at...

We examine the hypothesis that the Norwegian innovation system is locked-in to a specialization pattern of scale dependent, resource intensive industries, in which innovation depends mainly on the in-house activities of (a few) large firms. To this extent, we employ a sectoral empirical analysis...

An important topic in the recent literature on firms’ innovation is the question of whether, and to what extent, firms which innovate once have a higher probability of innovating again in subsequent periods. This phenomenon is called the ‘persistence of innovation’. Although the literature...

In this paper we analyze whether and how “research” and “development” subsidies influence private R&D activity. Our empirical results show that “research” subsidies stimulate R&D spending within firms while “development” subsidies substitute such spending. At the theoretical...

In this paper we assess how important “industry” is to innovation. Our empirical estimates suggest that “industry factors” matter little to how firms’ search for new innovations. These results offer empirical support to recent evolutionary theory where firms have heterogeneous...

Firms increasingly rely upon external actors for their innovation process. Interaction with these actors may occur formally (i.e. through a collaboration agreement) or informally (i.e. external actors acts as sources of knowledge). This paper analyses the reasons why firms consider it to be...

In this paper we focus on the participation stage and analyze what kinds of firms that are granted access to the 5 most important technology programs in Norway. Based upon a combination of logistic regression and factor analysis we find that the public support system for R&D in Norway is built...

Organizational search processes is an important source of firm level heterogeneity in evolutionary - behavioural theory. Combining insights from established and recent evolutionary-behavioural theory we propose that R&D and managerial perceptions constitute two distinct search pathways to...

Firms increasingly rely upon external actors for their innovation process. Interaction with these actors may occur formally (i.e. through a collaboration agreement) or informally (i.e. external actors acts as sources of knowledge). This paper analyses the reasons why firms consider it to be...

Firms increasingly rely upon external actors for their innovation process. Interaction with these actors may occur formally (i.e. through a collaboration agreement) or informally (i.e. external actors acts as sources of knowledge). This paper analyses the reasons why firms consider it to be...