The diffusion of innovations is supposed to dissipate inventors' rents. Yet in many documented cases, inventors freely shared knowledge with their competitors. Using a model and case studies, this paper explores why sharing did not eliminate inventors' incentives. Each new technology coexisted...

Recent innovation literature has documented the benefits of cross-pollination of ideas across a wide set of industries and technology fields in an economy. Industrial and trade policies, by contrast, tend to favor economic specialization through the promotion of selected sectors. In this paper...

In this work we analyse patterns of technological development using patent applications at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over the 1973-2012 period. Our study focuses on the combinations of technological fields within patent documents and their evolution in time, which can...

The aim of this paper is to show that innovations are the result of complex interactions between different private and public agents. For that, we identify the nature of the information sources that firms use to produce their innovations and assess the impact of these different sources on the...