Social enterprise software is a highly promising software application for firms, though it is still in an infancy state. It offers rapid real-time information transfer based on business collaboration tools or instant messaging. The software collects and processes customer data from surveys,...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the three main enterprise systems (Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM)) and firms' innovational performance. It studies whether the enterprise systems have impacts on process as...

Both M&A and innovation are instruments for growth and competitive advantage. Therefore they are fundamental to each firm?s competitive strategy. Usually, both instruments have been studied separately, but much less in conjunction. This is unfortunate as both processes - the process of...

Using a newly constructed panel dataset of German enterprises, I estimate R&D and capital investment equations for the time period from 1990 to 1994. Simple accelerator specifications indicate considerable sensitivity of R&D and investment to cash flow for relatively small firms. Much of this...

This paper analyzes the relationship between service innovation and different types of enterprise software systems, i.e. standardized enterprise software designed to fit one certain business sector and enterprise software specifically customized for a single firm. Using firm-level data of a...

This article analyzes how the perceived effectiveness of intellectual property protection and competitive pressure affect firms' innovation strategy choices, concretely, whether to abstain from innovation, to introduce products that are known in the market but new to the firm (imitation) or to...

This study shows for a large sample of R&D-active manufacturing firms that collaborative R&D has a positive effect on firms' patenting in terms of both quantity and quality. When distinguishing between alliances that aim at joint creation of new knowledge and alliances that aim at exchange of...

Innovation is commercialization of technology. Imperfections in markets for technology should leave marks on physical investments for innovation. Two types of transaction costs could affect innovative investments: royality stacking and hold-up threats. Backward references in firm's patent...

Innovators seek to protect their intellectual assets by patenting them, at the same time trying to avoid any disclosure of critical knowledge. Given that a patent specification has to include a clear description of the patented matter so that anybody skilled in the art is enabled to reproduce...

Thickets of partially overlapping patent rights raise costs to secure IPR for innovation. Fragmented IP ownership raises coordination costs to resolve mutual blockades. Inadvertent patent infringement poses the risk of fruits from investments to be exploited. A gap in economic commitment levels...