This article considers cognitive distance and combined competence as predictors of concrete outcomes in co-operative Research and Development projects. The operationalisation is based upon a dedicated survey, answered by matched pairs of projects managers in partnering organisations, addressing...

This paper explores the role of R&D worker mobility on innovation performance. As one main novelty, we employ churning as a measure for worker mobility. Churning depicts the number of workers which are replaced by new ones. It is a very informative indicator since a firm may be exposed to...

Established firms often face significant obstacles to innovation. As a solution, it has been suggested to form corporate ventures. Based on a sample of corporate and independent ventures in German manufacturing, we show that corporate ventures are more innovative than the control group, i.e. the...

Inventors often experience a low productivity after their company has been subject to a merger or acquisition (M&As). It is of central managerial interest to identify factors facilitating the integration of new inventive staff and thereby counteracting innovation declines after M&As. This paper...

The concept of knowledge has gained in interest since industrialized economics have induced a shift in importance from labor, capital and natural resources towards intellectual resources. This study investigates how the management of knowledge influences the innovation performance of a firm....

This paper explores the contribution of design activities on product market performance of Belgian companies. While there is mounting evidence that design can be seen as a strategic tool to successfully spur sales of new product developments at the firm level, the topic of design innovation has...

This paper empirically studies the impact of the adoption of open source software (OSS) on firms' labor productivity and innovative behavior. Using a representative sample of German firms, the results show that the adoption of OSS operating systems for servers and general OSS applications has no...

The not-invented-here (NIH) syndrome refers to internal resistance in a company against externally developed knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the occurrence of the NIH syndrome depends on the source of external knowledge and the success of the firm that aims at adapting external...

University research provides valuable inputs to industrial innovation. It is therefore not surprising that private sector firms increasingly seek direct access through funding public R&D. This development, however, spurred concerns about possible negative long-run effects on scientific...

This study presents a novel empirical approach to identify financing constraints for innovation based on the concept of an ideal test as suggested by Hall (2008). Firms were offered a hypothetical payment and were asked to choose between alternatives of use. If they selected additional...