Examining parallels in the long-term evolution of the German and US university systems, this paper formulates hypotheses about the rise and decline of university entrepreneurialism at the national level. Three macro-level antecedents of university entrepreneurialism are identified: (1)...

Summary This paper argues that design innovation constitutes an important means for multinational corporations (MNCs) to manage the standardization-adaptation dilemma in product development for international markets. Through design innovation MNCs can accommodate the heterogeneity of different...

The paper explores the influence of institutional frameworks on the evolution of the German software and biotechnology sectors. It links institutional constraints to poor performance of German firms in high volume market niches characterized by turbulent technological change and substantial...

The effective corporate governance of innovating firms calls for a capacity to deal with novelty, visibility and appropriability. Such capacities are found to vary among sectors, in terms of industry-specific expertise, firm-specific perceptiveness, and (sometimes) stakeholder enfranchisement....

This paper examines a feature of German industrial organisation, namely the patterns of supplier networks established by the automotive industry in East Germany, using Ope1 and VW in Zwickau and Eisenach as case studies. The paper argues that these networks depart from a 'regional' public policy...

Detailed case study material illustrates why the performance of two British national champions (British Airways and British Telecom respectively) was superior to that of their German counterparts (Lufthansa and Deutsche Telekom): beyond just the effects of privatisation, both the airline and...

Offshore knowledge incubation (OKI) denotes the effort by foreign R&D units of MNCs to achieve local embeddedness within the host-country R&D system, even at the expense of remaining detached from the rest of the MNC. An open-ended social interaction and learning process, OKI can be seen as a...

We studied "regional innovation relays" as MNC regional offices that mediate between knowledge generation at the local level and knowledge application at the global level. The significance of the region as a nexus of innovation is illustrated by concrete examples from U.S. and Japanese MNCs. The...