Firms increasingly rely upon external actors for their innovation process. Interaction with these actors may occur formally (i.e. through a collaboration agreement) or informally (i.e. external actors acts as sources of knowledge). This paper analyses the reasons why firms consider it to be...

We use patent citation networks to study the dynamics of technical change in Ethernet, a standard for data communication. We first consider the evolution of the broad technological system of Local Area Networks (LANs) and we identify the most significant inventions within the specific subfield...