This paper investigates the role of skills and the division of labor among participants in collective inventions. Our analysis draws on a large sample of projects registered at Sourceforge.net, the world's largest incubator of open source software activity. We test the hypothesis that the level...

This paper investigates the role of skills and the division of labor among participants in collective inventions. Our analysis draws on a large sample of projects registered at Sourceforge.net, the world’s largest incubator of open source software activity. We explore the hypothesis that the...

From a survey of the inventors of 9,017 European patents, this paper provides new information about the characteristics of European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of...

This paper focuses on European small- medium "serial innovators" at the beginning of the 1990s and provides an empirical basis to answer the following questions: who are the upstream specialized small- medium technology producers? How are they distributed across countries? Are there technologies...

This paper explores how firms' skills and organizational change affect the returns from investments in ICT. Our work contributes to the literature by testing the hypothesis of complementarity in a panel of 540 Italian manufacturing firms during 1995-2000. By drawing on different statistical...