This paper examines the question, whether the growing use of new technologies and decentralized forms of work organization affects the age structure of workforces within firms. The initial idea behind this relationship is that technological and organizational change may not only be skill-biased,...

We extend Lazear's theory of skills variety and entrepreneurship in three directions. First, we provide a theoretical framework linking new business creation with an entrepreneur's skill variety. Second, in this model we allow for both generalists and specialists to possess skill variety. Third,...

Are differences in inventor productivity due to differences in inventors’ skills or differences in the capabilities of the firms they work for? We analyze a 37-year panel that tracks the patenting of U.S. inventors and find strong evidence for serial correlation in inventors’ productivity....

This paper shows how organizational, technical, and environmental factors affected firm decisions to adopt Internet technologies during the early years of the commercialization of the Internet. Organizations that had made prior investments in client/server networks had a higher likelihood of...

This paper introduces the evolving understanding and conceptualization of innovation process models. We categorize the different approaches to understand and model innovation processes into two types. First, the so-called innovation management approach focuses on the evolution of corporate...

Innovation is a collective process that entails the coordination of distributed knowledge across diverse organizations. Technology infrastructures provide innovation systems with governance mechanisms to create and sustain complementarities across otherwise dispersed competences. The paper...

Although patent data has been utilized in previous studies, none focus explicitly on the real difference between advanced and developing countries in the area of technological capabilities. We propose that patent data can capture three dimensions of technological capability. First, the simple...

The recent surge of patent disputes plays an important role in discouraging firms from entering new technology domains (TDs). Using a large-scale dataset combining data from the EPO-PATSTAT database and ORBIS-IP and containing patents applied at EPO between 2000 and 2015, we construct a new...

Innovation is one of the usual suspects in defining differences in performance among firms, according to a strong and diverse theoretical framework. Understanding the diversity that exists within the population of innovative firms is essential to elaborate appropriate innovation policies. Our...

This article investigates whether firms react to a radical technological substitution threat by a deliberate acceleration of innovation in their existing technology - the 'sailing ship effect'. There have been repeated claims that the effect has been significant as a source of innovation...