How can we explain the success of cooperative networks of firms that share innovations, such as Silicon Valley or the Open Source community? This Paper shows that if innovations are cumulative, making an invention publicly available to a network of firms may be valuable if the firm expects to...

Successful innovation depends on the development and integration of new knowledge in the innovation process. In order to innovate successfully, the firm will combine different innovation activities. In addition to doing own research and development, firms typically are engaged in the acquisition...

We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing, domestic outsourcing, profits and innovation using plant level data. We find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level. Such a...

We provide a simple framework to analyse the effect of firm dominance on incentives for R&D. An increase in firm dominance, which we measure by a premium in consumer valuation, increases the dominant firm's incentives and decreases the rival firm's incentives for R&D. These changes influence the...

To stay on top of global competition, firms and governments often need to acquire innovative goods and services, including ideas and research, from their strategic suppliers. A careful design of procurement policy is crucial to make potential suppliers generate and sell the most suitable...

Information and knowledge are essential to the decision making of firms. However, information is a primitive in the formation of knowledge. Information and the related concepts of risk and surprise are primarily of importance for rational decision making while knowledge is a form of...

We review the role of R&D in endogenous growth theory, and describe extant empirical research – macro and micro – bearing on R&D as an engine of growth. Taking R&D to be key, while recognizing the significance of economic incentives, emphasizes knowledge as an economic object and, more...

This Paper surveys the economic literature on the impact of trade unions on innovation. There are many theoretical routes through which unions may have an effect on innovation, for example through their effects on relative factor prices, profitability and their attitudes towards the introduction...

This paper aims at showing how the Research and innovation Act of July 1999 modifies (stimulates?) the role of the local governments, this question being declined in several sub-interrogations dealing with the articulation between the legal framework, the local centres of competence and the...

This paper surveys recent findings about how the financial markets value the knowledge assets of publicly traded firms. The motivation for using market value equation to price knowledge assets is discusssed and the theory behind this equation is briefly presented. Then the empirical literature...