Aim of this study is to combine micro-aspects of firm behaviour with macro-aspects of business development and identify market conditions (for example, price competition) and firm characteristics (for example, type of R&D partners) that enable a firm to have a procyclical, anti-cyclical or...

The aim of this article is to investigate the differences between specific motives of R&D investment in foreign locations with respect to the factors influencing the likelihood of foreign R&D and to the impact of foreign presence on the parent firms’ innovativeness and productivity. An...

Innovative start-ups, not start-ups in general, seem to be important drivers of economic growth. However, little is known about how such firms look like. As activities of start-ups are strongly related to firm founders, we investigate this question focusing on the innovation capability of firm...

This paper aims at analyzing (a) the factors determining the firms’ propensity to outsource various processes (b) the impact of outsourcing on firms’ innovation performance as well as labour productivity. The integral investigation of the determining factors as well as the impact of...

In this paper we demonstrate the complexity that regulates the innovation-exports nexus. In particular we argue that innovation and exports should be treated as latent variables in order to account for as many facets possible thus, accounting for multifaceted heterogeneity. In this context, the...

Human resource management (HRM) practices are generally expected to stimulate a firm’s innovation performance. However, which of these practices do really pay off? Based on a unique dataset that includes detailed information for both a firm’s innovation activities and different types of HRM...

The relevance of services FDI strongly increased over the last two decades. As goods and services differ with respect to important characteristics, one may expect that the determinants of internationalisation are not identical in manufacturing and the service sector. However, there is...

This paper investigates the relationship between indicators for the intensity of use of ICT (examining three different types of ICT widely used in firms: internal, e-sales, e-procurement IS), several forms of workplace organization, and human capital on one hand, and several measures of...

This paper investigates the post-merger performance effects of merger and acquisitions (M&As). Our study is based on a representative sample that includes all Swiss M&As that took place in the period 2006–2008. In contrast to previous studies in this field most of our M&As took place between...

In a first step, we developed based on existing theoretical and empirical literature a series of hypotheses with respect to the relative importance of possible determinants of exploration and exploitation of knowledge in collaboration with universities and tested them on Swiss firm data. In a...