Nanotechnologies are reshaping the boundaries between industries, combining two aspects of innovation - both enhancing competences based on cumulative knowledge and experience and destroying competences by forcing the renewal of the firm's knowledge base. To analyze how worldwide R&D leaders...

There is growing academic and policy interests in the factors that underpin the formation and the growth of clusters, especially for such 'hyped up' scientific and technological fields as the nanotechnologies. This paper analyses the determinants of scientific cluster growth (measured by the...

This article investigates how anchor firms sustain high tech clusters rejuvenation by means of technological pre-adaptation. Based on evidences are drawn from the comparison of the evolution of two nano-electronics clusters, i.e., Grenoble (France) and Catania (Italy) clusters which are sharing...

As an introduction to the special issue on “emerging nanotechnologies”, this paper puts in perspective contemporary debates and challenges about nanotechnology. It presents an overview of diverse analyses and expectations about this presumably revolutionary set of technological, scientific...

The paper investigates the linkages between the characteristics of technologies and the structure of a firms' knowledge base. Nanotechnologies have been defined as converging technologies that operate at the nanoscale, and which require integration to fulfill their economic promises. Based on a...

This paper suggests understanding better the debate between reputation and celebrity, by analyzing how various types of reputations can combine (or not) to achieve celebrity. Based on a quantitative analysis of the most reputed French architects, we contribute to the reputation and celebrity...

This paper examines how scientific and technological (S&T) human capital is transformed into financial capital through the creation of firms by scientists. The analysis is based on a database describing the positions held by 132 founders from 62 French biotech SMEs. It shows that star scientists...

Drawing on institutional theory, the global production of business research is analysed by examining the system of written outputs using one of the largest databases of journal papers ever assembled, covering over 65,000 articles produced by more than 54,000 authors from over 8,000 different...

Studies in the field of sociology of innovation and economics of technical change have shown that technologies and their markets are highly intermingled. If we accept that technologies can shape the market, it leads to paying attention to how technologies are designed and developed. Indeed, the...

Early optimism about the potential of biotechnology to contribute to "the production of food with improved quality and nutritional content" (ACOST, 1990) has waned in the face of consumer resistance to the use of genetically modified organisms in food. The European food and drink sector has not...