We build on and extend the literature in open innovation and absorptive capacity by showing that a firm’s functional areas are an important locus of innovation and learning, in contrast to most existing literature, which takes the firm as the unit of analysis. In particular, we argue that the...

We investigate the intra-organizational antecedents of firm-level absorptive capacity (AC). Specifically, we examine how the functional areas of R&D, manufacturing and marketing contribute to the absorption of knowledge coming from different external knowledge sources. The econometric results on...

Patent statistics represent a critical tool for scholars, statisticians and policy makers interested in innovation and intellectual property rights. Many analyses are based on heterogeneous methods delineating the inventors' or firms' patent portfolios without questioning the quality of the...

Despite their critical role in innovation success, marketing activities are overlooked when the sources of innovation persistence are considered. Using three waves of the French CIS innovation survey covering the period 2002-2008, this paper investigates the influence of marketing activities on...

This article investigates technological and organizational antecedents of product related service (PRS) strategies implemented by manufacturing firms. We examine the way manufacturing practices and the related technological and organizational innovations impact PRS offered by firms. Using an...

Despite the claim that technology has been one of the most important drivers of healthcare spending growth over the past decades, technology variables are rarely introduced explicitly in cost equations. Furthermore, technology is often considered exogenous. Using 1996-2007 panel data on Swiss...

Thanks to the second French Community Innovation Survey, a measurement of the importance of public research organisations as a useful source of innovation for manufacturing firms is available. We thus provide an exploratory econometric model where the internal R&D organisation and location of...

The paper considers the impact of multiple shareholder-oriented governance practices on R&D decisions. Based on a sample of 5,713 firms belonging to 110 large French listed business groups, our results substantiate the idea that shareholder-oriented governance practices and a lower position in a...

Standard innovation surveys do not consider incoming spillovers for non-innovative firms. The Swiss innovation surveys presented here measure the importance of competitors’ knowledge for both innovating and noninnovating firms. This original feature not only enables us to accurately identify...

In 2003, Chesbrough coined the term “open innovation” as a new paradigm for industrial innovation. In this paper, we review and synthesize the growing literature that follows Chesbrough by studying the commercialization of external innovations — one of the key open innovation...