The number of research grants awarded to biomedical researchers is found to have a positive effect on their subsequent number of publications and patents but either no effect or a negative effect on the subsequent number of commercial contracts signed. The exception was ‘development grants’...

Conditional on the decision to enter the market for immature technology, we test for the effects that trust—proxied by the context in which the negotiating parties first met—has on the likelihood that these negotiations are successful. Using survey responses from 860 university–firm and...

The debate regarding the determinants of persistent abnormal profits is re-examined using a new approach to the measurement of profits which explicitly accounts for intangible capital. Abnormal profits are estimated using data on tangible and intangible capital for 2800 Australian firms over a...

One of the great unknowns of patent policy is how much infringement goes on, and how much of that infringement leads to enforcement of an informal or formal kind. Our representative survey of over 3700 Australian inventors estimates that 28 per cent of inventions (which were the subject of a...

Economists and strategic management theorists interested in sustained competitive advantage often examine firms’ management of knowledge. Somewhat surprisingly, the interaction between knowledge creation and knowledge capture practices has received little attention. Using survey data from...

One of the principles enshrined in all international patent treaties is that equal treatment should be provided to inventors regardless of their nationality. Little is known about whether this ‘national treatment’ principle is upheld in practice. We analyze whether patent examination...

There is a common, largely anecdotally-based belief that registered intellectual property is a less efficient form of protection for SME inventors compared with inventors from large firms. This paper discusses the reasons why SMEs may be disadvantaged in their use of intellectual property as...

There is no shortage of dialogues and commentaries extolling the need for more innovation to regenerate sagging national productivity growth. However, hard evidence on whether or not innovation makes a difference is largely absent because most firm-level studies are drawn from cross-sectional...