The paper investigates the diversified patterns of outsourcing in the Lombardy region and relates them to the probability of introducing product and process innovation. Based on a large firm-level survey, we show that outsourcing processes are strongly regionally embedded and that offshoring is...

This paper has been prompted by an increasing sense of dissatisfaction with the current fashion of criticising the so-called “Linear Model” of innovation. LM). The frequency and hostility of remarks against the linear model raises the suspicion that something is wrong indeed. Why so much...

The paper focuses on some organizational dynamics that have characterized pharmaceutical industry in the last thirty years, when biotechnology and the development of life sciences have defined a new technological paradigm, reshaping many aspects of the industry, especially the organization of...

Knowledge-intensive activities are bound by imperfections that limit the provision of incentives, particularly asymmetric information about inputs and unclear definition of outputs. Thus, performance-based incentives are not possible. We then model a contract in which the firm can use the...

develop an endogenous growth model to study the long run consequences of offshoring with firm heterogeneity and incomplete contracts. In so doing, we model offshoring as the geographical fragmentation of a firm’s production chain between a home upstream division and a foreign downstream one....

This paper investigates the skills and the division of labor among participants in collective inventions. Our analysis draws on a large sample of projects registered at Sourceforge.net, the world’s largest incubator of open source software activity. We test the hypothesis that skill variety of...

We analyzed the scientific productivity of a sample of academic scientists that contribute to the field of Materials Science in the post-patenting period, by means of several econometric techniques suitable to treat unobserved heterogeneity, excess zeros and incidental truncation. Although...

Widespread adoption of a new capital-embodied technology often requires a continuous flow of incremental innovations, aimed at making renting the new machine a viable alternative to buying it, or at dividing it up in modular elements, and possibly allowing for product range extension....

This paper examines how the framework of path-dependency and technological trajectories can be applied to explain the observed distribution of patent values as it is revealed in the distribution of patent citations. A very simple model of based on generalized Polya urn processes is proposed to...

Patents for inventions are at the crossroad of law, technology and economics, with the Patent System resting on two fundamental assumptions: one, that technical progress is desirable and that disclosure is preferable to secrecy; two, that a competitive market economy is in the public interest,...