This paper investigates the role of 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 explore the hypothesis that the...

The empirical studies relative to the Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) case stress the important role played by psychological and social motivations. However, the theories elaborated to cope with this dimension, such as gift economyʺ, epistemic communityʺ or community of practiceʺ, are...

This paper focuses on European small- medium "serial innovators" at the beginning of the 1990s and provides an empirical basis to answer the following questions: who are the upstream specialized small- medium technology producers? How are they distributed across countries? Are there technologies...

The paper attempts to interpret a few stylized facts of international economic growth by means of an open economy evolutionary model. The idea is that growth models that incorporate a richer representation of the properties and effects of technological change can give a better explanation of the...

In this work, we present an assessment of the nature and impact of current "globalizing" tendencies at various levels of observation. The evidence in this respect suggests that it has mostly concerned financial flows (especially short-term ones); to some extent trade flows; and only to very...

This paper estimates the determinants of labour productivity in European NUTS regions during 1989-1996. Unlike previous studies, which have focussed either on local technological capabilities or on agglomeration economies, we compare three potential explanations of regional advantages:...