It is known that small firms rely mainly on the CEO's individual knowledge for developing innovations. Recent work suggests that this approach is inefficient since it underutilizes other employees' knowledge. We study to which extent using CEOs, managers and non-managerial employees' ideas...

Competition forces firms to find new ways to advance in the market and be innovative in order to differentiate themselves from rivals. Design activities may be one of several key factors contributing to new product development. The success story of Apple's iPod has shown that the right design...

The resource-based view of the firm is characterized by the idea that capital, labor and natural resources are the factors influencing the economic growth of a company. In the last decades, the awareness of knowledge as an important driver of economic growth has increased, and led to the...

This paper investigates the impact of in-house R&D and innovation management practices on innovation success in small and medium-sized firms (SMEs). While there is little doubt about the significance of technology competence for generating successful innovations, inhouse R&D activities may be a...

Knowledge spillovers to competitors are regarded as an important aspect of the innovation process. While a company possibly benefits from incoming information on successful Ramp;D conducted by other companies, a generally high probability of leakage of knowledge in an industry will negatively...

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...

The present paper first discusses theoretically the different incentives of manager- versus owner-controlled firms for investment into innovative activity. In addition, the role of debt financing is analyzed. Subsequently the results from an empirical study on the determinants of innovative...

This study tests for financial constraints on Ramp;D investment and how they differ from capital investment. To identify constraints in the access to external capital, we employ a credit rating index. Our models show that internal constraints, measured by mark-ups, are more decisive for Ramp;D...

We analyze financial constraints for Ramp;D, where we account for heterogeneity among investments which has been neglected in previous literature. According to economic theory, investments should be distinguished by their degree of uncertainty, e.g. routine Ramp;D versus cutting-edge Ramp;D....

We develop a simple model of competition for the market that shows that, contrary to the Arrow view, endogenous entry threat in a market induces the average firm to invest less in R&D and the incumbent leader to invest more. We test these predictions with a Tobit model based on a unique dataset...