In this paper, we describe the results of an inquiry into the nature of appropriability conditions in over one hundred manufacturing industries, and we discuss how this information has been and might be used to cast light on important issues in the economics of innovation and public policy. Our...

The set of technological opportunities in a given industry is one of the fundamental determinants of technical advance in that line of business. We examine the concept of technological opportunity and discuss three categories of sources of those opportunities: advances in scientific...

In some economics textbooks production theory is developed axiomatically. The “divisibility axiom” presents a bold affront to realism. It distorts the static theory and forecloses some potential encounters with technological change. The article reviews propositions about geometrical scaling...

Organizational routines are considered basic components of organizational behavior and repositories of organizational capabilities (Nelson & Winter, 1982). They do, therefore, hold one of the keys to understanding organizational change. The article focuses on how the concept of organizational...

This paper reviews the assessment of the routines and capabilities literature provided by T. Felin and N. J. Foss, ‘The Endogenous Origins of Experience, Routines and Organizational Capabilities: The Poverty of Stimulus’, published by the <italic>Journal of Institutional Economics</italic>. Although valuable...

This work is an attempt, first, to outline the basic building blocks of evolutionary theory in economics and, second, to offer a comparative assessment of different strands of literature which call upon evolutionary ideas of some sort. We sketch out what we consider to be the main results...

In 1937, Ronald H. Coase published The Nature of the Firm, a ground-breaking paper which raised fundamental questions about the concept of the firm in economic theory. In this volume, leading business economists commemorate Coase's classic article and consider its relevance to economic theory...

This paper shows how idiosyncratic resources can be the basis of sustained profitability and persistent heterogeneity under competitive conditions: Generic inputs purchased in the market become idiosyncratic resources by investments in customization. Analytically, we show how heterogeneous firms...

Organizational routines are considered basic components of organizational behavior and repositories of Organizational capabilities (Nelson and Winter, 1982). They do, therefore, hold one of the keys to understanding organizational change. We identify problems encountered in such research and...