There has been a longstanding concern about protecting intellectual capital. The legislation awards a generator of the capital with a finite period of a monopoly right to access it.Under the protection, a right holder may exclusively exploit its intellectual capital and assign or license the...

This product cycle model captures how imitation can serve as a stepping stone enabling firms from Southern countries to undertake innovation. Successful imitation of the state-of-the-art quality level makes inventing an even higher quality level attractive for Southern firms. Subsidizing...

The sensitivity of innovation activities with respect to the business cycle is often assumed to be small. In this paper the hypothesis on cyclical dependence of innovation activities is tested for firms in the German manufacturing, and additionally for SMEs. To this end firms? innovation...

This paper investigates whether firms innovate persistently or discontinuously over time using an innovation panel data set on German manufacturing and service firms for the period 1994-2002. We find that innovation behaviour is permanent at the firm-level to a very large extent. Using a dynamic...

Innovation and export decisions are closely interlinked. Both activities contribute to firm performance in various ways: exporting provides a wider market to sell products, while innovation provides new and better products to supply those markets and/or more efficient ways to reduce costs. The...

The sensitivity of innovation activities with respect to the business cycle is often assumed to be small. In this paper the hypothesis on cyclical dependence of innovation activities is tested for firms in the German manufacturing, and additionally for SMEs. To this end firms' innovation...

This paper summarizes the findings of a research program aimed at outlining the importance to the firm growth process of competencies that arise from investments in intangible assets. The program has consisted of two parts. First, longitudinal databases have provided a rich set of studies on...

Globalization has set new paradigms, especially in the business world. Breakthroughs in technology (telecommunications, logistics, the internet) and ideology (most notably economic and political trends in China and India) are creating exciting opportunities as well as crucial challenges. This...

The innovation activities of foreign subsidiaries have been identified as an important source of competitive advantage for multinational corporations. The success of these engagements depends heavily on tapping host country pools of localized expertise. To achieve this foreign subsidiaries have...

This study focuses on the early stages of international innovation activities, i.e. the organizational processes through which promising ideas from around the globe are collected and evaluated. We ask: What characteristics make foreign knowledge interesting to domestic R&D managers? We envision...