This paper focuses on the role of human capital in attenuating the barriers that block firms from engaging in innovation activities. The paper distinguishes between firms facing deterring barriers to innovation (firms deterred from engaging in innovation activities) and firms confronting...

Patent citations added by examiners are often used indicators of technological impact and knowledge flows, despite various critiques. In this study, we analyse the distribution of examiner patent citations according to patent characteristics, to show their limitations. According to our findings,...

Most studies of patents citations focus on national or international contexts, especially contexts of high absorptive capacity, and employ examiner citations. We argue that results can vary if we take the region as the context of analysis, especially if it is a region with low absorptive...

This paper investigates whether engagement in consulting activities has a significant impact on the research performance of academic scientists. The study relies on a sample of 2678  individual faculty, from five Spanish universities, who have been recipients of publicly funded grants or have...

This paper tracks university-to-firm patent citations rather than the more usual patent-to-patent or paper-to-patent citations. It explains regional and non-regional citations as a function of firms’ absorptive capacity and universities’ production capacity in the region rather than...

This paper provides an in-depth case study of the ink-jet printing (IJP) technology that emerged from a mature industrial sector in the Castellon region (Spain) in the first decade of 2000. We propose an analytical framework that combines the theoretical perspectives of Industrial Districts and...

This paper investigates the influence of country-specific factors on the degree of reliance on public knowledge among innovators. Using backward citations as our dependent variable we find that national characteristics indicative of the quality of the innovation system generally have a positive...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the effect of the external knowledge sourcing strategies adopted by firms, on the development of both product and process innovation, and assesses to what extent this effect is influenced by the firm's internal technological capabilities. Our empirical...

The analysis of social networks has  remained a crucial and yet understudied aspect of the efforts to measure Triple Helix linkages. The Triple Helix model aims toexplain, among other aspects of knowledge-based societies, “the current research system in its social context” (Etzkowitz &...

This paper shows that the features that characterize the exchange of information among individuals vary depending on the type of information exchanged (novel or specific) and the institutional affiliation of the individuals involved. It unbundles the concept of strong and weak links into three...