Increasing evidence indicates that a large share of granted patents are ''undeserved'' because they do not meet the criteria of novelty or non-obviousness. In recent decades, many jurisdictions introduced patent reforms to avoid weak patent applications and improve legal patent quality. In...

During the Covid 19 Pandemic, there have been countless calls for the creation of ''global public goods'' or ''global commons'' issued by a variety of actors with sometimes diametrically opposed views, as if the two notions had the same meaning. And indeed, even today these notions are still...

This paper is based on the acknowledgment that NK models are an extremely useful tool in order to represent and study the complexity stemming from interactions among components of a system. For this reason NK models have been applied in many domains, such as Organizational Sciences and...

This note discusses the medical/therapeutical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and their 'political economy' context. First, the very quick development of several vaccines highlights the richness of the basic knowledge waiting for therapeutical exploitation. Such knowledge has largely...

The paper investigates the effects of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) on corporate research and development (R&D) strategies using Community Innovation Survey (CIS) data on the Dutch manufacturing sector. The focus of the research is whether M&A affect corporate innovation strategies, favouring...

The recent surge of patent disputes plays an important role in discouraging firms from entering new technology domains (TDs). Using a large-scale dataset combining data from the EPO-PATSTAT database and ORBIS-IP and containing patents applied at EPO between 2000 and 2015, we construct a new...

This paper discusses the evolution of firms' productivity and structural heterogeneity (SH) in the Brazilian manufacturing industry in the 2000s. SH is defined (following the Latin American structuralist tradition) as a situation in which a large share of total firms is in the lowest...

Innovation is one of the usual suspects in defining differences in performance among firms, according to a strong and diverse theoretical framework. Understanding the diversity that exists within the population of innovative firms is essential to elaborate appropriate innovation policies. Our...

This paper contributes to the relatively new literature on the role of intermediaries in international trade. Using Italian firm-level data, we document significant differences between exporters of different types and highlight the role of country-specific fixed cost in the choice of direct...

This work offers an overview of recent formalizations of organizational capabilities and learning. We first present the main characteristics both of NK models and of the approach based on Classifier Systems, focusing on their early applications to organization studies. We then discuss how the...