Building on the notion of general and specific human capital proposed by Becker (1962), the paper highlights the importance of employee training practices undertaken in firms as an important tool for human resource and knowledge management and focuses on the role of works councils as a specific...

The “knowledge governance approach” is characterized as a distinctive, emerging approach that cuts across the fields of knowledge management, organisation studies, strategy, and human resource management. Knowledge governance is taken up with how the deployment of governance mechanisms...

This paper analyzes whether firms conducting internal R&D and acquiring external high-tech equipment experience a complementarity effect. For German CIS data we conduct a complete set of indirect and direct complementarity tests refining the analysis by looking at various types of innovations...

This paper explores the impact of diversity of innovative strategies of firms upon the industrial dynamics through a micro-simulation model. We consider two types of firms each one being characterised by a specific innovative strategy. Basically we assume that some cumulative firms adopt an...

Innovative start-ups are an important driver of economic growth. This article presents empirical evidence on the effects of R&D on new product development, inter-firm alliances and employment growth during the early life course of firms. We use a dataset that contains a sample of new firms that...

We use data from 15 508 Finnish companies with 10 or more employees for the years 2003-2008 to explore the relationship between employment growth and three endogenously determined business subsidy types (i.e. employment subsidy, R&D subsidy and the group of other business subsidies). We find a...

This paper discusses the role of so-called national champions within the context of the EU's ambitious goal to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economic region in the world by 2010. We find football to be a useful analogy in our discussion of national champions. There are...

There already exists broad literature investigating small and innovative firms in many respects. However, there have been few attempts to assess this group of firms' propensity to patent or its patenting activities. This paper intends to fill that gap. By applying a new approach to account for...

Technological change and gains in efficiency of renewable power generation technologies are to a large extent driven by governmental support. Various policies that can broadly be categorized as technology push, demand pull or systemic constitute a policy mix for renewable energies. Our goal is...