A rising competitive pressure for innovations comes along with an increasing number of companies and public research facilities that include external sources of information into the innovation process. This trend towards an open innovation process can be verified empirically. External R&D...

Cooperation can benefit and hurt firms at the same time. An important question then is: when is it better to cooperate. And how can an appropriate partner be selected? In this paper we present a model of inter-firm cooperation driven by cognitive distance, appropriability conditions and external...

We explore the evolution of the structure and performance of a social network in a population of individuals who search for local optima in diverse and dynamic task environments. Individuals choose whether to innovate or imitate and, in the latter case, from whom to learn. The probabilities of...

In Chang and Harrington (2000a) a computational model of a multi-unit firm is developed in which unit managers continually search for better practices Search takes place over a rugged landscape defined over the space of unit practices There it is shown that a more centralized organization is...

Scientific progress is driven by innovation ?which serves to produce a diversity of ideas ?and imitation through a social network ?which serves to diffuse these ideas. In this paper, we develop an agent-based computational model of this process, in which the agents in the population are...

Can directed technical change be used to combat climate change? We construct new firm-level panel data on auto industry innovation distinguishing between dirty (internal combustion engine) and clean (e.g. electric and hybrid) patents across 80 countries over several decades. We show that firms...

Patents have long been regarded as the 'gold standard' of intellectual property protection. In 'Little patents and big secrets: managing intellectual property', Anton and Yao (2004) call this traditional view into question by finding that firms keep their most important innovations secret. This...

Traditionally patents are seen as the gold standard for intellectual property protection. But, in line with empirical findings that secrecy is considered more important for appropriating returns, recent theories predict that firms keep their most important inventions secret. This article...

How does technical progress affect long-term unemployment? The relationship between long-term unemployment and the rate of growth attributable to technical progress is evaluated in a growth-matching-model with heterogeneous jobless workers and with endogenously determined long-term unemployed...

In this paper we survey the theoretical literature on both pollution-reducing and resource-saving technological progress. The literature can be divided into two strands. One strand deals with microeconomic models which investigate incentives to adopt and to develop environmentally more friendly...