develop an endogenous growth model to study the long run consequences of offshoring with firm heterogeneity and incomplete contracts. In so doing, we model offshoring as the geographical fragmentation of a firm’s production chain between a home upstream division and a foreign downstream one....

The paper investigates the diversified patterns of outsourcing in the Lombardy region and relates them to the probability of introducing product and process innovation. Based on a large firm-level survey, we show that outsourcing processes are strongly regionally embedded and that offshoring is...

The aim of this paper is to look at knowledge integration as an organizational capability which leaves traces in intra-organizational networks. To do so, this paper develops a methodology to identify and capture with quantitative data the key characteristics of those organizations that integrate...

Pervasive outsourcing is transforming business models and productive relations in advanced manufacturing areas. In particular, the international dimension of outsourcing, off-shoring, has been attracting great attention, as it leads to the emergence of global value chains and internationally...

Innovation is widely acknowledged as one of the main forces driving economic growth. However, despite our significant knowledge of the technological determinants of innovation processes, an adequate understanding of demand side factors is still lacking. This paper aims to survey the literature...

This paper investigates the 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 skill variety of...

This paper has been prompted by an increasing sense of dissatisfaction with the current fashion of criticising the so-called “Linear Model” of innovation. LM). The frequency and hostility of remarks against the linear model raises the suspicion that something is wrong indeed. Why so much...

We identify multiple structural breaks in a growth series using the econometric method developed by Bai and Perron (1998, 2003). We then regress the indicator of detected positive and negative breaks on three kinds of explanatory variables: external shocks, institutions and policies. Our results...

Modularity has gained recently a growing attention in the management literature as a key to explain the contemporary trends of industrial dynamics, according to which external «market-based» economies have become predominant over internal «bureaucracy-based» economies. Nowadays global...

This work is concerned with the determinants of innovations and competition of technologies in the case of the Local Area Network industry. It focuses in particular on two suppliers of LAN components: the access technology industry and the internetworking industry. Two elements driving the...