This paper considers the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program as a policy fostering academic entrepreneurship. We highlight two main characteristics of the program that make it attractive as an entrepreneurship policy : early-stage financing and scientist involvement in...

Determining the research and development (R&D) boundaries of the firm as the choice between internal, collaborative and external technology acquisition has since long been a major challenge for firms to secure a continuous stream of innovative products or processes. While research on R&D...

Nanomaterials are seen as a key technology for the 21st Century, and much is expected of them in terms of innovation and economic growth. They could open the way to many radically new applications, which would form the basis of innovative products. In this context, it seems all the more...

The literature on skill-biased technological change concentrates on highly skilled and unskilled employees. It is unclear, however, if the employment opportunities of the majority of the labour force in Germany-employees with a degree from the dual apprenticeship system-increase or not. In...

Innovations are a key factor to ensure the competitiveness of establishments as well as to enhance the growth and wealth of nations. But more than any other economic activity, decisions about innovations are plagued by failures of the market mechanism. As a response, public instruments have been...

In this paper we analyse the relationship between export and innovation activities of German service sector companies using data from the 1997 wave of the Mannheim Innovation Panel in the Service Sector. There is a lot of support for the Schumpeterian hypothesis of export activities being mainly...

This paper analyses the determinants of employment reactions of firms when environmental innovations have been carried out. It differentiates hereby between employment increases and decreases. The data stem from a telephone survey covering more than 1500 firms in five European countries that...

Young firms with the ability to internationalize early and decisively have received much attention in recent academic discussion. However, relatively little is known about the underlying processes that enable them to skip several stages of the internationalization process. We contribute to this...

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...

This paper focuses on the pre-establishment period of start-ups in industrial districts. The industrial architecture is what I call a "rationed agglomeration" in which some entrepreneurs gather around an established firm while other entrepreneurs in the same business stand alone. In a rationed...