Research on intellectual property has focused on formal legally recorded rights that we call deeded, most often measured by granted patents. Meanwhile, other "defacto" IP (mainly purposive secrecy and natural excludability) has become more important because of the increasing closeness of...

This paper applies a rational action/economic sociology approach to the central organizational theory question of whether action is embedded in pre-formed institutions that are relatively cheap in terms of time and energy, or to what extent action becomes embedded in newly constructed...

This paper examines the value of collecting archival data to evaluate the Advanced Technology Program's (ATP) impact on participants' short- and long-term business success. We use two types of indicators of business success: patenting activity which can be tracked for all participants, and...

The basic competitive model with freely available technology is suited for static industries but misleading as applied to major innovative economies for which development of new technologies equals in magnitude around 10% of gross domestic investment. We distinguish free generic technology from...

This paper is a case study of the transformation in research methods which occurred in a large U.S. pharmaceutical firm as a result of the biotech revolution. This transformation is inconsistent with the hypothesis that technological revolutions make existing firms obsolete and consistent with...

Most firms achieve perfective progress, incrementally improving commodities or productivity. But technological progress is concentrated in a few firms achieving metamorphic progress: forming or transforming industries with technological breakthroughs (e.g., biotechnology, lasers, semiconductors,...