Since the German re?unification in 1990, Eastern Germany is a transition economy. After a phase of catching up of productivity with respect to Western Germany from 1991 to 1996, the growth rates in the producing sector have dropped below the Western German ones since 1997. This study...

Social software applications such as wikis, blogs or social networks are being increasingly applied in firms. These applications can be used for external communication as well as knowledge management enabling firms to access internal and external knowledge. Firms can optimize customer...

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...

There appears to be an ambivalent dimension in innovation strategies: timing. When is an innovation ready for the market or when is the market ready for the innovation? This paper empirically investigates the determinants of a firm?s decision to become a first mover or a follower in innovation...

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...

The neoclassical model of the production function, as applied by Robert Solow to build the neoclassical model of growth, linked labor and capital to output. More recently, Romer and others have expanded the model to include measures of knowledge capital. In this paper we introduce a new factor,...

This paper exploits the unique institutional features of South Africa to estimate the impact of provincial public spending on health, education and transport on firm productivity. Our identification strategy is based on within industry-province differences between firms of the effects of public...