The present contribution focuses on two issues. The first one concerns the characteristics of industrial districts and the increasing weight of these districts in the Italian system of production. The second issue is about the competitiveness of the Italian industrial districts, if they...

This paper examines the effect of the German co-determination law of 1976 (MitbestG) on the innovative activity of German firms. Co-determination applies to firms with 2000 employees or more. Data from 1971-1976 and 1981-1990 on 148 firms are used to compare the number of patents granted to...

India's diversified and sophisticated manufacturing base contrasts strongly with the near complete absence of visible innovative capabilities. This article examines the Indian "National System of Innovation" in order to address the question of the evident distinction between the ability to make...

This paper examines the dynamic and multi-level relationship between organization and innovation from three different but interdependent perspectives: a) the relationship between organizational structural forms and innovativeness; b) innovation as a process of organizational learning and...

Over the last century and a half, global technological leadership has shifted from Great Britain to the United States. In this paper we argue that China is positioning itself to assume global leadership in technology within the coming few decades. We identify three sources of competitive...

We present a dynamic model in which an employee of a firm searches for business projects in a changing environment. It is costly to induce the employee who found a successful project in the past period to search for a new project. Past success can therefore result in profitreducing corporate...

We study a situation in which an R&D department promotes the introduction of an innovation that results in costly re-adjustments for a production department. In response, the production department tries to resist change by improving the existing technology. We show that firms balancing the...

We present a model where the employees of a firm have to search for profitable business projects in a changing environment. Employees who have found a successful project in the past period are shown to be reluctant to search for new and better projects leading to corporate inertia. This reduces...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the innovative activities of business groups in Latin America. It compares the innovativeness of group-affiliated firms (GAFs) and standalone firms (SAFs), and it investigates how country-specific institutional factors – financial, legal, and labor...

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then describe how these factors are frequently measured in the data and some resulting empirical regularities....