Nowadays, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry has been under thorough scrutiny. Popular press claims of intensive marketing activities that go beyond R&D, the strong increase of me-too drugs, and, at the same time, the high industry profitability have contributed to public skepticism. Despite this...

Persistent differences in the level of business ownership across countries have attracted the attention of scientific as well as political debate. Cultural as well as economic influences are assumed to play a role. This paper deals with the influence of cultural attitudes towards uncertainty on...

Social networks matter in the innovation processes of young and small firms, since ‘innovation does not exist in a vacuum (Van De Ven, 1986: 601).’ The contacts a firm has could both generate advantages for further innovation and growth, and disadvantages leading to inertia and...

This paper reports on a major portfolio restructuring at Shell. The restructuring involved the divestment of a significant part of Shell?s highly integrated chemical business. We study this event and -particularly- the related control issues, using Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) as our basic...

For an economy where knowledge plays an increasingly important role in shaping its dynamics, economics needs a dynamic (Schumpeterian) welfare theory. This paper sketches the role of knowledge in an economy and argues that a static Paretian welfare economics is inadequate, or at least needs to...

For a commercially operating railway company, providing a high level of service for the passengers is of utmost importance. The latter requires a high punctuality of the trains and an adequate rolling stock capacity. Unfortunately, the latter is currently (2002) one of the bottlenecks in the...

In this paper we empirically investigate various benefits and costs associated with broker characteristics of individuals who operate in the account management system of financial service providers. We narrow our focus to broker positions in two specific task-specific knowledge networks that...

Organizations exist to create value for their stakeholders that stakeholders cannot create through individual effort. Information systems exist to increase an organization’s ability to create value using intellectual capital. A theoretical explanation of value might therefore be useful to...

Though the majority of standards are company standards, scientific standardisation literature pays hardly any attention to them. In this paper we describe results from a research project on company standardisation (Oly & Slob, 1999). The researchers investigated six chemical and petrochemical...

This paper offers a meta-theory concerning the relation between the general and the specific in science. This issue was recently called back to attention by Hodgson (2001). A heuristic of discovery, developed in earlier work (Nooteboom 1992, 1996, 1999b, 2000a), is used in an attempt to...