The paper analyses the birth of the Encryption Software Industry (ESI), a new niche in the software industry. Using a Chandlerian perspective, this work reports the main facts about firm entry and growth, with a particular focus on start-up strategies and actions. Since scale economies do not...

This paper analyzes the birth of the Encryption Software Industry (ESI), a new market niche in the software industry. This work will report the main facts of entry and exit process, focusing on firm post-entry performance, on the different phases of competition during the industry evolution, and...

This paper employs an original dataset for 146 US metropolitan areas to test some propositions that characterize two different models of organizing firms and industries: the managerial firm, epitomized by the work of Alfred Chandler, and the entrepreneurial system, recently highlighted by many...

This paper investigates the relationships between firm organization attributes, namely a structure á la Chandler, and their inward looking or exploitation attitude in R&D and innovation. We argue that because of sunk costs and learning processes an inward looking behavior is a consequence of...

This study analyzes incumbent entry timing decisions in new markets in the case of Encryption Software (ES). In ES first technological movers were slow to enter the downstream market, losing their initial advantages to the benefit of newcomers. This work tests the hypothesis that this...

We analyze firms’ incentives to cluster in an industrial district to benefit from reciprocal technology spillovers. A simple model of cumulative innovation is presented where technology spillovers arise endogenously through labor mobility. It is shown that firms’ incentives to cluster are...