This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firm’s distance to the industry frontier. We use data on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...

This paper investigates the value of high-powered incentives for motivating search for novelty in business organizations. While organizational search critically depends on the individual efforts of employees, motivating search effort is challenged by problems of unobservable behavior and the...

Innovative nascent entrepreneurs face the problem of obtaining finance, mainly due to information problems. We use new data on capital seeking start-ups allowing distinction between planning stage and early stage. Being innovative does not affect the probability of having external finance in the...

The emergent “learning economy” is truly global in the sense that it deeply affects the whole world. The emergence of “learning societies”, though, is a process that takes place only in some regions, the patterns followed by this highly complex social process being far from converging....

This paper introduces a model of knowledge sharing of lead users located in a public and unrestricted community of users. While existing literature on knowledge sharing focuses on allocation and collaboration processes inside or among companies we extend this to the community level. We then...

It has been demonstrated that users occasionally innovate. However, it can now be observed that even end-consumers act as a source novel product designs. A case study of a firm, and “its” consumers - from the computer games industry - illustrates how sourcing of consumer knowledge has...