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 proposes to identify the micro-level sources for the dynamic increasing returns occurring at an aggregate level. The paper reverts to a micro model of technological change in-line with the evolutionary literature on industrial dynamics. The data generated through numerical simulations...

While explaining cluster internal impacts on cluster development, cluster life cycle theory fails to explain the influence of cluster external factors. Based on a multiscalar approach, this study investigates factors causing change within an agritech cluster applying a qualitative approach. Main...

Given the significance of technology in the course of socio-economic evolution, the driving forces behind the continuous accretion of technological knowledge deserve particular attention. This paper suggests a hypothesis about the motivational underpinnings of human technological creativity that...

The Lisbon strategy for growth and jobs seeks to use knowledge and innovation in the context of the European Research Area (ERA). To build the ERA the European Union (EU) implements – amongst others - regional innovation policy. Ample scientific publications have investigated how innovation...

The paper unravels the subversive nature of Schumpeter’s proposition that entrepreneurs carry out innovations (the micro level), that swarms of followers imitate them (meso) and that, as a consequence, 'creative destruction’ leads to economic development 'from within’...

In infant industries, a great share of new market opportunities is depleted by firms that spinoff from incumbents. A model emphasizing the relation between incumbents' evolving corporate cultures and the generation of spinoffs explains this regularity in industry evolution. Organizations reach a...

One reason why firms exist, this paper argues, is because they are suitable organizations within which cooperative production systems based on human social predispositions can evolve. In addition, we show how an entrepreneur – given these predispositions – can shape human behavior...

In this paper the relationship between firm growth and external knowledge sources, such as related firms and universities, is studied. The spatial characteristics of these relationships are examined by geolocating firms into a more realistic relational space using travel time distances and using...

Inter-firm competition has received much attention in the theoretical literature, but recent empirical work suggests that the growth rates of rival firms are uncorrelated, and that firm growth can be taken as an essentially independent process. We begin by investigating the correlations of the...