Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) constitute a disruption to the workingenvironment of the inventive labor force of the acquired company. If inventors wouldrespond with a decline of their patent productivity or departure from the firm thiscan be detrimental to the innovative process within the...

Determining the research and development (R&D) boundaries of the firm as the choicebetween internal, collaborative and external technology acquisition has since long been amajor challenge for firms to secure a continuous stream of innovative products or processes.While research on R&D...

We analyze financial constraints for R&D, where we account for heterogeneityamong investments which has been neglected in previous literature. According toeconomic theory, investments should be distinguished by their degree ofuncertainty, e.g. routine R&D versus cutting-edge R&D. Financial...

In this paper we analyse the decision of firms in the Canadian manufacturing sectorto co-operate on innovation projects. Our focus is on the motives behind this decisionand the firm characteristics, both general and with respect to innovation activities,which influence the motives for innovation...

Do academic scientists bring valuable human capital to the companies they found or join? If so, what are the particular skills that compose their human capital and how are these skills related to firm performance? This paper examines these questions using a particular group of academic...

This paper analyses whether strategic motives for patenting influence the characteristics ofcompanies’ patent portfolios. We use the number of citations and oppositions to representthese characteristics. The investigation is based on survey and patent data from German companies.We find clear...

The increasing commercialization of university discoveries has initiated acontroversy on the impacts for future scientific research. It has been argued that anincreasing orientation towards commercialization may have a negative impact onmore fundamental research efforts in science. Several...

Technological change is often hypothesized as one of the main drivers of mergeractivities. This paper analyzes the role of technology in mergers and acquisitions(M&As) at the firm level. Based on a newly created data set that combines financialinformation and patent data for public limited...

This study focuses on the early stages of international innovation activities, i.e. theorganizational processes through which promising ideas from around the globe are collectedand evaluated. We ask: What characteristics make foreign knowledge interesting to domesticR&D managers? We envision...