This paper seeks to reconcile the notion of a 'societal effect' in business organisation with the considerable evidence that competitive pressures continuously lead national producers to emulate the business practices of other nations, which are perceived as providing a basis for superior...

This paper examines the nature of genuine uncertainty and rule-following behaviour and suggests some implications for the theory of the firm. The firm is seen here as emerging as a means to manage some of the experienced uncertainty. The nature of the firm is perceived as an evolving institution...

Evolutionary theories of technological change and industrial dynamics give primary importance to interaction between heterogeneous agents, endowed with complementary assets and competencies. Accordingly, support to co-operative R&D is central to technology policy, as a mean for increasing system...

Recent studies of capital-skill complementarity suffer from several important empirical limitations and a theoretical framework that treats technological change as exogenous. This paper addresses some of these limitations using a new, detailed firm-level dataset on technology usage and labor...

It is often claimed that the opportunities to create new manufacturing jobs in open, high-cost economies such as Norway, are concentrated in activities which are technologically advanced and knowledge intensive. This paper examines the relationship between job creation and innovation, as...

The paper examines the evolution of technological specialisation in a group of selected countries over the period between 1890 and 1990. Technological specialisation of each country is measured by the RTA (Revealed Technological Advantage) index, based on patent statistics, in four different...

The simultaneous diffusion of several technologies is studied. We build a modcl that encompasses recent theoretical arguments on diffusion and cxtend these to the multipie technologies case. The model is estimated using a panel of data on UK manufacturing industries relating to the diffusion of...

This paper studies the links between productivity, innovation and research at the firm level. We introduce three new features: (i) A structural model that explains productivity by innovation output, and innovation output by research investment: (ii) New data on French manufacturing firms,...

Numerous attempts have been made to account for cross-industries differences in technological efforts; most of them have been accomplished along the lines of the structure-conduct-performance hypothesis. It is our purpose to reverse such an approach in the light of the latest theoretical and...

Patent citations have been widely used in order to study inter-technology and science-technology relations. The present work aims at: i) exploring time relations and distance between technical/innovative activities and scientific knowledge, using journal articles citations in patents as a proxy;...