Population ecology models are elegant in form and adequate in describing aggregate data, but poor in telling stories and predicting the location of growth. Fundamentals models emphasizing the variables central to resource mobilization, such as intellectual human capital, can predict where and...

We examine the effects of university-based star scientists on three measures of performance for California biotechnology enterprises: the number of products in development, the number of products on the market, and changes in employment. The `star' concept which Zucker, Darby, and Brewer (1994)...

The local academic science base plays a dominant role in determining where and when biotechnology is adopted by existing firms or -- much more frequently -- exploited by new entrants in the U.S. In Japan this new dominant technology has almost exclusively been introduced through organizational...

Firms invest differentially in the intellectual human capital required to recognize, evaluate, and utilize technological breakthroughs occurring outside the firm. Such differential investment has been crucial in explaining which incumbent pharmaceutical firms have successfully transformed their...

This paper examines the value of collecting archival data to evaluate the Advanced Technology Program's (ATP) impact on participants' short- and long-term business success. We use two types of indicators of business success: patenting activity which can be tracked for all participants, and...

Commercializing knowledge involves transfer from discovering scientists to those who will develop it commercially. New codes and formulae describing discoveries develop slowly - with little incentive if value is low and many competing opportunities if high. Hence new knowledge remains naturally...

We examine the relationship between the intellectual capital of scientists making frontier discoveries, the presence of great university bioscience programs, the presence of venture capital firms, other economic variables, and the founding of U.S. biotechnology enterprises during 1976-1989....

The most productive (`star') bioscientists possessed intellectual human capital of extraordinary scientific and pecuniary value for some 10-15 yrs after Cohen & Boyer's 1973 founding discovery for biotechnology. This extraordinary value was due to the union of still scarce knowledge of the new...

Scientists who make breakthrough discoveries can receive above- normal returns to their intellectual capital, with returns depending on the degree of natural excludability - that is, whether necessary techniques can be learned through written reports or instead require hands-on experience with...

The basic competitive model with freely available technology is suited for static industries but misleading as applied to major innovative economies for which development of new technologies equals in magnitude around 10% of gross domestic investment. We distinguish free generic technology from...