Knowledge and competence are increasingly regarded as the most critical resources of firms and economies. Much recent attention has focused, in particular, on the importance of 'tacit knowledge' for sustaining firms’ competitiveness, and its role in technological innovation and organisational...

This paper is a slightly revised version of Bengt-Åke Lundvall's Inaugural Lecture, the 10th of November at Department for Business Studies, Aalborg University. The general message is that the growing frequency of so-called paradoxes in economic theory and of unsolved socioeconomic problems...

In this paper I argue that quality standards, products standards, and quality classes influence the priority that firms give to different product developments. These standards may be viewed as institutions in the sense of shared rules of behavior or codes. They have become shared because there...

The paper deals with the policies for an idealized transition of a National System of Innovation (NSI) from a system reflecting a relatively closed industrializing economy to an NSI which reflects the conditions of a well-developed "Information Society" and "Learning Economy". The analysis of...

This paper shows empirically that in an intra-industry oligopolistic scenario the location of a firm’s innovative activities plays an important role in determining its partner selection in R&D alliances. Such a role is mainly attributed to a strategic use of R&D alliances as a means to limit...

This paper tries to bring new insights on the dynamics of inter-firm by focusing on cognitive and organisational dimensions. We consider the knowledge bases created inside the agreement and the characteristics of such knowledge bases (such as tacitness, level of generality, degree of...

This study makes use of the results of a postal questionnaire sent to a sample of large private sector companies in Britain and France to address two key issues in the new institutional analysis of the firm. The first is the way the institutional environment supports and constrains the design of...

Innovation may be seen as a process of knowledge creation and the speed and direction of knowledge creation reflects the organizational set-up of the firm as well as its investments in R&D and training. Establishing ‘a learning organization’ where horizontal interaction and communication...

Cross-functional teams play a potentially important part in the innovation process enabling knowledge sharing, the development of trust and overcoming spatial and organizational barriers. Using a supermodularity approach, we focus on potential complementarities which may arise when...

This paper examines the factors that influence whether firms draw from universities in their innovative activities. The link between the universities and industrial innovation, and the role of different search strategies in influencing the propensity of firms to use universities is explored. The...