Hidden Champions (HCs) are small- and medium-sized global market leaders that repeatedly show superior innovation capabilities and economic performance. However, empirical evidence on how the digital transformation may affect their success story remains scarce. I argue that HCs show stronger...

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for the monitoring of new technology introduction in a B2B environment. We focus on B2B environments, i.e. on projects where a new technological solution is implemented (and often jointly developed) with a client being either a company or an...

This study investigates the origins of disruptive innovation. According to the canonical model, disruptive innovations do not originate from existing customers - in contrast with what the user innovation literature would predict. We compiled a unique historical and content-analytic dataset based...

Innovation studies use labels such as radical or disruptive to qualify innovation according to different concepts. Within the literature, these labels are frequently used interchangeably due to overlaps in their characteristics. These various definitions present challenges when the labels are...

Whereas various drivers of the international innovative activity have been studied in the literature, our understanding of the contributions of different innovation linkages to innovation deserves more attention. Are the different innovation linkages equally complementary to research inputs in...

This paper estimates the effect of heterogeneous university funding stemming from the German Excellence Initiative on a regional firm’s probability to innovate by using a multi-valued two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences model. The estimations show that funding an additional...

Reverse engineering allows firms to learn about critical components and design features of competitors' technologies. Historically, reverse engineering has often been used to help technological laggards to catch-up and profit from other's inventions. However, through reverse engineering firms...

The development of low emission vehicles (LEVs) in the automotive sector stands out in the literature as a typical case of technological competition between a dominant design and a set of alternative green technologies. The incremental trajectory of green technologies aimed at improving the...

This paper extends the existing literature on strategic R&D alliances by presenting a model of innovation networks with endogenous absorptive capacity. The networks emerge as a result of bilateral cooperation over time between firms occupying different locations in the knowledge space. Social...