Japanese multinational companies (MNCs) have often been portrayed as highly centralised firms that limit the roles of overseas subsidiaries to the assembly and sale of standardised products designed and developed in Japan (see, e.g. Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989: 51-2, 158-161). Their foreign...

Building on the work of Penrose (1959), Richardson (1960; 1972) and others, recent contributions to the theory of the firm have emphasised the importance of endogenously developed capabilities and competences for building sustained competitive advantages (see, for example, Foss and Knudsen, 1996)....

Recent studies of sectoral specialisation and technological development across market economies have shown how contrasting patterns of technical change can be explained by the different institutional frameworks that have become established in distinct types of economy (see, e.g., Casper, 2000;...

The bidder who wins at an auction may end up paying more for an asset than it is actually worth. This, stated very simply, is the so-called winner's curse. Consider the simplest possible case where the asset has the same actual value to all bidders, but bidders do not know for certain what that...

The aim of the present work is to study the evolution of organizational knowledge within Academic Spin-off (ASO) firms throughout their life cycle. The exploitation of tacit and indivisible new knowledge developed in the context of academic institutions entails agency problems of different...

Facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities ahead in the knowledge economy, managing knowledge has been a priority for many organisations. Knowledge Management (KM) emerges and has quickly gained weight in research both from information systems perspective and management sciences. An amply...

This paper analyses the process of knowledge growth in a branch of medical science. Our study of scientific advances in glaucoma research is organized in two parts. In the first we present a qualitative overview of the problem sequences that have characterized 150 years of medical research in...

This paper is about the implications of a nation’s approach to defence procurement for its national innovation system and the innovation that occurs within it. Defence procurement involves choices over what is to be purchased (the product), from whom it should be bought (the producer), and how...

Departing from a number of theoretical perspectives from which rationales for science,technology and innovation (STI) policy can be extracted, this paper discusses threequestions. First, what rationales for public intervention can be derived from differenteconomic theories, including theories...

Interaction between private and public organisations is a fundamental source of innovation and a crucial framing condition for reaping the benefits of new technologies through their diffusion in regulated domains. With a focus on the health sector, in this essay we investigate the emergence of...