Pharmaceuticals is one of the few industries in which patents are recognized as being key instruments for privately appropriating the economic benefits of innovation. Competition is largely based on innovation, and basic science is becoming increasingly crucial for the discovery and development...

The paper, as such a draft of a chapter for the second edition of the 'Handbook of Economic Socielogy', Edited by Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, is meant to offer some sort of roadmap accross a few fields of investigation concerning the relationships between technological learning and...

In this work we discuss the impact of the new ICT techno-economic paradigm upon the vertical and horizontal boundaries of the firm and ask whether the change in the sources of competitive advantage has resulted in changes in the size distribution of firms and also in the degree of concentration...

This paper empirically investigates how the inter-sectoral knowledge flows affect the international competitiveness of industries, once controlling for both cost and other technological factors. Using patent data on 14 manufacturing industries in 16 OECD countries over the period 1995-2009, we...