Past research has revealed that knowledge integration is an important prerequisite for the success of new product development. For this reason, companies deploy a number of formal mechanisms to foster integration across multiple functions and hierarchical levels. In many SMEs, however, such...

There is growing evidence that firms increasingly adopt open innovation practices. In this paper we investigate the impact of two such external knowledge acquisition strategies, "buy" and "cooperate", on firm's product innovation performance. Taking a direct (productivity) approach, we test for...

Innovations are rarely generated in complete isolation. Due to inherent uncertainty, high knowledge requirements, and high financial investments, many firms search for external partners to develop new products and processes. However, there is an ongoing debate as to whether firms who cooperate...

Digitalization is one of the main trends affecting firm-level innovation today. In this context, a better understanding of the multidimensional relationship between digital technologies, competences and firm-level innovation is necessary. For this purpose, this paper examines the role of digital...

We use the U.S. patent data merged with firm-level datasets to establish new facts about the role of mega firms in generating "novel patents"--innovations that introduce new combinations of technology components for the first time. While the importance of mega firms in novel patents had been...

Almost 30 years ago, researchers began a systematic study of innovation by end users and user firms. At that time, the phenomenon was generally regarded as a minor oddity. Today, it is clear that innovation by users, generally openly shared, is a very powerful and general phenomenon. It is...

More than 1,500 organizations and investors representing over $40 trillion in assets have committed to fossil fuel divestment to combat climate change. Will it work? This chapter explores whether divestment might induce green innovation, a critical component of transitioning to a cleaner...

This paper claims that internationalisation of innovation and the involved dispersal of activities in multinational companies needs to be reassessed. It is rarely a uniform phenomenon, but instead selective, sequential and temporal. The paper derives five ideal types of organising innovation in...

Do large firms produce more valuable inventions, and if so, why? After confirming that large firms indeed produce more valuable inventions, we consider two possible sources: a superior ability to invent, or a superior ability to extract value from their inventions. We develop a simple model that...