Hospitals are making big investments in various types of ICT, so it is important to investigate their effects on innovation and performance. In this paper is presented an empirical study in this direction, based on data for 743 hospitals from 18 European countries, which were collected in the...

This paper describes a comparative empirical study of the effect of information and communication technology (ICT) capital, human capital and new organizational practices on labour productivity in Greek and Swiss firms. We use firm-level data collected in 2005 through a common questionnaire...

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...

This paper aims at investigating empirically at the firm level the effect of the use of modern information and communication technologies (ICT), and also of two other factors, the adoption of new forms of workplace organization and trade (export) activities, on the demand for employees with...

This article aims at analyzing (i) the factors determining the firms' propensity to outsource various processes (production of intermediate products, production of final products, R&D activities, ICT activities), and (ii) the impact of outsourcing on firms' innovation performance, as well as...

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...

In this article the term knowledge and technology transfer broadly denotes any activities targeted at transferring knowledge and technology that may help a company or a research institution – depending on the direction of the transfer – to further promote its activities. We present here the...

This study investigates the factors that determine firms’ decisions to adopt energysaving technologies. We distinguish between the decisions of whether or not to use a technology (“inter-firm diffusion”), and of how intensely to use a technology (“intra-firm diffusion”). The empirical...

In this study we investigate the impact of early stage venture capital on innovation activities of start-ups. This is done based on a cohort of start-ups that is representative of all firms founded in Switzerland in 1996/97, as recorded by a census of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office for...

The main objective of this empirical paper is to identify characteristics of imitation and innovation and shed light on possible differences between these two kinds of innovative activity. Thus, it tries to answer the following questions: (a) what are the determinants of imitative performance...