Why do some country’s hi-tech firms innovate better than others? Why did hi-tech firms from the United States outperform such Japanese companies in the 1990s? Through a wealth of empirical evidence, the book compares the development trajectory of manufacturing technology and information...

Successive increases in R&D that creates new functionality are essential for global competitiveness. However, unexpectedly, as a consequence of the two-faced nature of information and communication technology (ICT), excessive R&D results in a marginal productivity decline leading to a decrease...