The purpose of this study is to present a unique database on commercialized patents and to illustrate how it can be used to analyze the commercialization process of patents. The dataset is based on a survey of Swedish patents owned by inventors and small firms with a remarkably high response...

One of the major reasons why inventors are awarded patents by governments is they encourage R&D investments and commercialization of inventions. If the patent holder commercializes his invention, he has stronger incentives to retain the patent. The purpose here is to empirically analyze the...

Israel M. Kirzner is the 2006 winner of The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research (the FSF-Nutek Award). In this Prize Lecture he argues that a number of those who have commented on his work have misunderstood certain aspects of his theoretical system, and as a...

The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research was instituted in 1996, and it is now firmly established as the leading Prize for outstanding research contributions in the area. Thanks to a generous donation from the Swedish entrepreneur Rune Andersson it has been...

Several scholars as well as industry professionals have claimed that there is a "software-biased shift" in the nature and direction of innovation in that software development is a core part of innovation activities in firms across a wide array of industries. Empirical firm-level evidence of such...

Since the mid-1990s value added has grown faster in the Swedish business sector than in the business sector of most other OECD countries. We investigate the association between ICT and R&D capital and value added in the Swedish non-farm business sector. By estimating neoclassical production...

Since the mid 1990s labor productivity growth in Sweden has been high compared to Japan, the US and the western EU-countries. While productivity growth has been rapid in manufacturing, it has been much slower in the service sector. Paradoxically, all employment growth since the mid 1990s has...

Trust and entrepreneurship are seen as key ingredients of long-term prosperity. However, it is not clear how these two are related. Part of the confusion can be traced back to the measurement of entrepreneurship, biased towards independent entrepreneurship (self-employed and new firms), and...

The issue of what explains differences in the wealth of nations is one of the most classic in economics. We propose de facto academic freedom as an explanatory variable. The main idea is that such freedom allows for the development of new useful knowledge through research unconstrained by...

Why do so many high-priced acquisitions of entrepreneurial firms take place in network industries? We develop a theory of commercialization (entry or sale) in network industries showing that high equilibrium acquisition prices are driven by the incumbents' desire to prevent rivals from acquiring...