The paper deals with the policies for an idealized transition of a National System of Innovation (NSI) from a system reflecting a relatively closed industrializing economy to an NSI which reflects the conditions of a well-developed "Information Society" and "Learning Economy". The analysis of...

This paper presents a lexical definition of firms' flexibility and its operationalization as used in the DISKO survey of 1900 Danish private firms. This operationalization is highlighted by data from a highly flexible firm which was visited in 1997 as part of a follow-up upon the questionnaire...

This paper examines the factors that influence whether firms draw from universities in their innovative activities. The link between the universities and industrial innovation, and the role of different search strategies in influencing the propensity of firms to use universities is explored. The...

A corporation’s offshore outsourcing may be seen as the result of a discrete, strategic decision taken in response to an increasing pressure from worldwide competition. However, empirical evidence of a representative cross-sector sample of international Danish firms indicates that offshore...

The existing empirical evidence is somewhat inconclusive with respect to a number of the key predictions of the agency model. Although the reach of agency theory is considerably wider, the dominant portion of work has been taken up with examining the nature of the trade-off between risk and...

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...

This paper analyses the association between inter-firm collaborative agreements and the technological capabilities of the largest European electronics firms between 1984 and 1997. To this purpose we collected information about 2,240 R&D agreements sponsored by the EU and 1,970 non sponsored...

This study makes use of the results of a postal questionnaire sent to a sample of large private sector companies in Britain and France to address two key issues in the new institutional analysis of the firm. The first is the way the institutional environment supports and constrains the design of...

This paper investigates innovating firms’ determinants of R&D collaboration with domestic universities and public knowledge institutes in Finland and the Netherlands. Three questions – relevant for innovation policies - constitute the central part of this paper. First, are innovating foreign...

The emergent “learning economy” is truly global in the sense that it deeply affects the whole world. The emergence of “learning societies”, though, is a process that takes place only in some regions, the patterns followed by this highly complex social process being far from converging....