Economists studying innovation and technological change have made significant progress toward understanding firms' profit incentives as drivers of innovation. However, innovative performance in firms should also depend heavily on the pecuniary and nonpecuniary motives of the employees actually...

This paper assesses the validity and accuracy of firms' backward patent citations as a measure of knowledge flows from public research by employing a newly constructed data set that matches patents to survey data at the level of the research and development lab. Using survey-based measures of...

In this paper, we use data from the Carnegie Mellon Survey on industrial R&D to evaluate for the U.S. manufacturing sector the influence of "public"(i.e., university and government R&D lab) research on industrial R&D, the role that public research plays in industrial R&D, and the pathways...

Joglekar, Bohl, and Hamburg (JBH) make two basic sets of criticisms of our paper (Cohen and Levinthal [Cohen, W. M., D. A. Levinthal. 1994. Fortune favors the prepared firm. Management Sci. 40 227--251.]) in their comment. First, they object to two key elements of the model structure: the...

A critical factor in industrial competitiveness is the ability of firms to exploit new technological developments. We term this ability a firm's absorptive capacity and argue that such a capability not only enables a firm to exploit new extramural knowledge, but to predict more accurately the...