The traditional argument that shorter product cycles favor trade secret over patenting is reviewed. A game theoretic model provides an argument that shorter product cycles can induce firms to file more patent applications. The firms may be trapped in a prisoners' dilemma where all firms would...

This study examines whether staged project management is beneficial or harmful for making product innovations. Using a unique firm survey for Japan, we find that firms that employed staged project management had a higher likelihood of introducing new products to the market. Additional...

It is known that small firms rely mainly on the CEO's individual knowledge for developing innovations. Recent work suggests that this approach is inefficient since it underutilizes other employees' knowledge. We study to which extent using CEOs, managers and non-managerial employees' ideas...

The sensitivity of innovation activities with respect to the business cycle is often assumed to be small. In this paper the hypothesis on cyclical dependence of innovation activities is tested for firms in the German manufacturing, and additionally for SMEs. To this end firms' innovation...

One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves that are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We use a natural way to discriminate between pure stock market influences on firm decisions and other influences by examining merger patterns...

Contractual and regulatory provisions for access affect incentives to invest in an upgraded network and, in particular, a next-generation access network. Investment decisions are made under uncertainty and have to be made over time. This papers provides a framework for taking uncertainty, risk...

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 paper studies the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on employment growth in these firms. A simple model that relates employment growth to process innovations and to the growth of sales separately due to innovative and unchanged products is developed and estimated...

Contrary to previous literature we hypothesize that interests of labor may well – like that of shareholders – aim at securing the long-run survival of the firm. Consequently, employee representatives on the supervisory board could well have an interest in increasing incentive-based...

This paper empirically investigates complementarities between different sources of research funding with regard to academic publishing. We find for a sample of UK engineering academics that competitive funding is associated with an increase in ex-post publications but that industry funding...