The present contribution focuses on two issues. The first one concerns the characteristics of industrial districts and the increasing weight of these districts in the Italian system of production. The second issue is about the competitiveness of the Italian industrial districts, if they...

India's diversified and sophisticated manufacturing base contrasts strongly with the near complete absence of visible innovative capabilities. This article examines the Indian "National System of Innovation" in order to address the question of the evident distinction between the ability to make...

This paper examines the dynamic and multi-level relationship between organization and innovation from three different but interdependent perspectives: a) the relationship between organizational structural forms and innovativeness; b) innovation as a process of organizational learning and...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the innovative activities of business groups in Latin America. It compares the innovativeness of group-affiliated firms (GAFs) and standalone firms (SAFs), and it investigates how country-specific institutional factors – financial, legal, and labor...

A central factor which characterizes design-related innovative activities is that a major source of knowledge – that is designers – is very often located outside the firm. This raises a central management issue for the firm and unavoidably generates a tension between designer consultants and...

This paper discusses firm-operational innovation processes against the background of conflict and cooperation relations between employers and work councils. It is demonstrated that the German model of codetermination offers occasion structures for an active role of work councils and other...

Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) have become ubiquitous in the current debate and have emerged as the key issue of global innovation policy. The ‘Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights’ (TRIPS) Agreement, signed in 1994 as a founding element of the World Trade Organisation,...

Much has been said lately about entrepreneurship, so it seems important to leave here some personal analysis on this topic. The issues outlined here result from a work in about a year in which because a personal and professional obligations it was doing some research on these issues. This is an...

This paper constructs a model where entrepreneurial innovations are sold into oligopolistic industries and where adverse selection problems between entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and incumbents are present. We first show that aggressive development of a basic innovation by better informed...

Why are some countries more technologically innovative than others? The dominant explanation amongst political-economists is that domestic institutions determine national innovation rates. However, after decades of research, there is still no agreement on precisely how this happens, exactly...