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on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Economy |
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Issue of 2013‒04‒27
thirteen papers chosen by Laura Stefanescu European Research Centre of Managerial Studies in Business Administration |
| By: | Erkan Gurpinar |
| Abstract: | The unprecedented development of intellectual property rights (both in scale and scope) has been one of the most important factors in the transformation of the world economy over the last three decades. We argue that, at least in part, economic importance of knowledge has brought an overreaching enclosure movement on it. IPRs regime protecting the knowledge base of firms deprives knowledge workers of owning the intellectual assets developed in the production process. This development, in turn, (a) has damaging consequences on the knowledge workers’ skills; thereby (b) the rise of a virtuous cycle between nonexclusive property rights and workers’ skills is prevented. |
| Keywords: | Intellectual property rights, knowledge intensive technology, institutional complementarities |
| JEL: | K11 L23 O34 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usi:wpaper:673&r=knm |
| By: | Mohnen, Pierre (UNU-MERIT, and SBE, Maastricht University); Hall, Bronwyn H. (University of California at Berkeley, NBER, UNU-MERIT, and SBE, Maastricht University.) |
| Abstract: | This paper reviews the existing evidence regarding the effects of technological and non-technological innovations on the productivity of firms and the existence of possible complementarities between these different forms of innovation. |
| Keywords: | innovation, productivity |
| JEL: | O30 O31 O33 O40 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:unumer:2013021&r=knm |
| By: | Cevikarslan, Salih (UNU-MERIT, and SBE, Maastricht University) |
| Abstract: | The aims of this paper are twofold. The first is to analyse the interaction between research and development (R&D) activities of firms and heterogeneous consumer preferences in structuring the evolution of an industry. The second is to explore the heterogeneity in firms' innovation strategies. Is heterogeneity sustainable in the long-term and what happens to the market shares of firms having different innovation strategies when a structural market characteristic (market size) or a behavioural rule (R&D intensity) is changed? To answer these research questions, an evolutionary, multi-agent based, sector-level innovation model is designed. The model addresses supply and demand sides of the market simultaneously with the co-evolution of heterogeneous consumer preferences, heterogeneous firm knowledge bases, and technology levels at the micro level. |
| Keywords: | Heterogeneity, innovation strategies, evolutionary economics, agent-based modelling |
| JEL: | B52 L11 O33 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:unumer:2013019&r=knm |
| By: | Idota, Hiroki; Bunno, Teruyuki; Tsuji, Masatsugu |
| Abstract: | ICT is expected to play an important role for innovations in Japanese SMEs. In this paper, how ICT use promotes innovation is clarified. In addition, what kind of business strategy SMEs should follow is attempted to achieve innovation by focusing on the behavior of the top management as well as employees. A mail survey was conducted in February 2012 to innovative SMEs. An ICT advancement index is constructed based on the sales management system, groupware, internal SNS and SCM. Logistic regression analysis is applied for verifying the four hypotheses by using the ICT index. The results obtained reveals that SNEs that used ICT for new product development such as collecting customers' needs achieve more product as well as process innovation. And it is confirmed that SMEs which positively share information using ICT achieve more process innovation. And top management should demonstrate the leadership, and manage the product innovation process through top-down including the promotion of ICT use. On the other hand, not only the manager but also the employees have to act flexibly and autonomously to share information by ICT are important in the process innovation that is required to restructure existing business processes. -- |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:itsb12:72548&r=knm |
| By: | Kotsemir, Maxim; Meissner, Dirk |
| Abstract: | This paper introduces the evolving understanding and conceptualization of innovation process models. From the discussion of different approaches towards the innovation process understanding and modeling two types of approaches to the evolution of innovation models are developed and discussed. First the so-called innovation management approach which focuses on the evolution of the company innovation management strategies in different socioeconomic environments. Second is the analysis the evolution of innovation models themselves in conceptual sense (conceptual approach) as well as analysis of theoretical backgrounds and requirements for these models. The main focus of analysis in this approach is on advantages and disadvantages of different innovation models in their ability to describe the reality of innovation processes. The paper focuses on the advantages and disadvantages as well as potentials and limitations of the approaches and also proposes potential future developments of innovation models as well as the analysis of driving forces that underlie the evolution of innovation models recently. |
| Keywords: | innovation models; innovation process; generations of innovation models; process dimension of innovation; innovation models evolution; innovation management |
| JEL: | O14 O30 O31 O32 O33 Q55 |
| Date: | 2013–04–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46504&r=knm |
| By: | Koen Frenken; Luis R. Izquierdo; Paolo Zeppini |
| Abstract: | We propose a model of technological transitions based on two different types of innovations. Branching innovations refer to technological improvements along a particular path, while recombinant innovations represent fusions of multiple paths. Recombinant innovations create “short-cuts” which reduce switching costs allowing agents to escape a technological lock-in. As a result, recombinant innovations speed up technological progress allowing transitions that are impossible with only branching innovations. Our model replicates some stylized facts of technological change, such as technological lockin, experimental failure, punctuated change and irreversibility. Furthermore, an extensive simulation experiment suggests that there is an optimal rate of innovation, which is strongly correlated with the number of recombination innovations. This underlines the pivotal role of technological variety as a seed for recombinant innovation leading to technological transitions. |
| Keywords: | variety, network externalities, lock-in, switching costs, recombinant innovations, transition, punctuated change |
| JEL: | C15 O33 |
| Date: | 2012–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:tuecis:wpaper:1201&r=knm |
| By: | Charlotte Schlump (Philipps-Universität Marburg); Thomas Brenner (Philipps-Universität Marburg) |
| Abstract: | Cooperation in innovation processes has become crucial for the competitiveness of many firms. This paper focuses on technology-oriented East German firms and analyses details of their cooperation behaviour by studying the relationships between geographic and social proximity, the importance and frequency of cooperative interaction and the attributes of innovation cooperation partners that influence the importance of cooperation. Data is collected in two questionnaires and analysed by regressions. It is found, among other results, that cooperation that is established via personal contacts is, on average, more helpful and important for firms but involves less frequent interaction. |
| Keywords: | cooperation, firm, East Germany, policy |
| JEL: | D20 I28 O32 R11 |
| Date: | 2013–04–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pum:wpaper:2013-06&r=knm |
| By: | Bilkic, Natasa (University of Paderborn); Gries, Thomas (University of Paderborn); Naudé, Wim (Maastricht School of Management) |
| Abstract: | We refine modelling of the radical innovation decision in this paper by extending real option theory to include non-marginal stochastic jump processes. From the model analytics we determine that the average magnitude and frequency of non-marginal stochastic jump processes are the most important parameters in this highly uncertain decision process. We show that these stochastic shocks imply that investment in radical innovation may very often be too time consuming and/or expensive to remain attractive for private entrepreneurs. |
| Keywords: | radical innovation, innovation, entrepreneurship, investment, R&D, risk, real option theory, technology |
| JEL: | D92 D81 L26 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7338&r=knm |
| By: | Mónica L. Azevedo (Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto); Óscar Afonso (CEF.UP, Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto); Sandra T. Silva (CEF.UP, Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto) |
| Abstract: | In what form should the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) be treated in an endogenous growth model? What are the effects of introducing IPR into a North-South endogenous growth model? In this paper, we develop a general equilibrium endogenous growth model that emphasizes the IPR enforcement effects on growth, in a scenario of North-South technological knowledge diffusion. The economy consists of three sectors, and firms are engaged in step-by-step innovation. In line with the literature, we introduce an IPR parameter that makes imitation more difficult. We find that, in steady state, the increases in IPR protection result in decreases in the growth rate. This result is in line with the literature, which argues that the enforcement of IPR does not always have a positive effect on economic growth and highlights that there is much more work to be done in this field of study, given that the existing results are not consensual. To sum up, we present some suggestions for future research which can help to clarify the relationship between IPR and endogenous growth. |
| Keywords: | Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), economic growth, North-South model |
| JEL: | O33 O34 O41 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:por:fepwps:492&r=knm |
| By: | Cevikarslan, Salih (UNU-MERIT, and SBE, Maastricht University) |
| Abstract: | The aims of this paper are twofold. The first is to analyse the interaction between research and development (R&D) activities of firms and heterogeneous consumer preferences in structuring the evolution of an industry. The second is to explore the effects of patent life and patent breadth on market outcomes. To answer these research questions, an evolutionary, multi-agent based, sector-level cumulative innovation model is designed. The model addresses supply and demand sides of the market simultaneously with the co-evolution of heterogeneous consumer preferences, heterogeneous firm knowledge bases and technology levels at the micro level. In line with the evolutionary modelling tradition, we have a search algorithm-innovation and imitation of products by firms - a selection of algorithm-revealed preferences of the consumers - and a population of objects in which variation is expressed and on which selection operates: namely, firms (Windrum, 2004). Firms compete on quality and price of their products in an oligopolistic market whereas consumers, constrained by their computational limits, act to maximize their utility with their product choices in a boundedly rational way. There is continuous firm entry and exit depending on the competitive performance of the firms. |
| Keywords: | Patents, industrial dynamics, evolutionary economics, agent-based modelling |
| JEL: | B52 L11 O34 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:unumer:2013020&r=knm |
| By: | Van Leeuwen, George; Polder, Michael |
| Abstract: | E-business systems are increasingly considered as important examples of ICT related innovations embodied in software applications, the adoption of which is essential for capturing the potential fruits of several ICT externalities. For analysing the importance of this type of embodied technological progress several routes are open. One route is to look at the data that can be used. In this paper we apply the same modelling strategy to two different types of data: 1) cross-country-industry micro-aggregated data obtained after applying Distributed Micro data Analysis (DMD) and 2) firm-level data, in this case for the Netherlands. Today, the econometric analysis based on firm-level data is often more advanced and more complicated from an econometric point of view than the analysis on aggregated data. We show that DMD can be extended to enable the estimation of more complicated models that feature recent directions in micro-econometric analysis on firm-level data. Our application concerns the innovative use of E-business systems by firms. Using a rich set of cross-country-industry data constructed and tailored by DMD for this purpose, we analyse the adoption of three E-business systems (Eterprise Resourc Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management). We investigate the complementarities in joint adoption and the productivity effects of adopting systems simultaneously or in isolation. The same exercise is repeated on firm-level data for the Netherlands. Our example illustrates that international benchmarking with more elaborate models on cross-country-industry panel data is feasible after using DMD to tailor the underlying firm-level data for specific research questions. This is an important result in the light of the restrictions on pooling cross-country micro data due to confidentiality rules. We find that the results are more diverging for the estimation of complementarities at the adoption stage than for the productivity effects of (joint) adoption. This result implies that measurement error and unobservable heterogeneity plays a greater role when explaining adoption pattern at the firm-level than at the aggregate level. |
| Keywords: | DMD, ICT, innovation, innovation complementarities, productivity |
| JEL: | D2 D24 D8 L2 L21 |
| Date: | 2013–03–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:46479&r=knm |
| By: | Ron Boschma; Gaston Heimeriks; Pierre-Alexandre Balland |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the impact of scientific relatedness on knowledge dynamics in biotech at the city level during the period 1989-2008. We assess the extent to which the emergence of new research topics and the disappearance of existing topics in cities are dependent on their degree of scientific relatedness with existing topics in those cities. We make use of the rise and fall of title words in scientific publications in biotech to identify major cognitive developments within the field. We determined the degree of relatedness between 1,028 scientific topics in biotech by means of co-occurrence of pairs of topics in journal articles. We combined this relatedness indicator between topics in biotech with the scientific portfolio of cities (i.e. the topics on which they published previously) to determine how cognitively close a potentially new topic (or an existing topic) is to the scientific portfolio of a city. We analyzed knowledge dynamics at the city level by looking at the entry and exit of topics in the scientific portfolio of 276 cities in the world. We found strong and robust evidence that new scientific topics in biotech tend to emerge systematically in cities where scientifically related topics already exist, while existing scientific topics had a higher probability to disappear from a city when these were weakly related to the scientific portfolio of the city. |
| Keywords: | relatedness, co-occurrence analysis, knowledge dynamics, geography of biotech, title words |
| JEL: | O33 R11 L65 D83 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egu:wpaper:1304&r=knm |
| By: | Costas Arkolakis; Natalia Ramondo; Andrés Rodríguez-Clare; Stephen Yeaple |
| Abstract: | One feature of globalization is that countries are increasingly specialized in either innovation or in production. To understand the forces behind this specialization and its welfare consequences, we develop a monopolistic competition model of trade and multinational production (MP) in which firms face a tradeoff between producing close to customers and producing in the least-cost location. At the country level, the location of innovation and production is determined by comparative advantage and home market effects that arise from the interaction of trade and MP costs with increasing returns to scale. The model yields simple structural expressions for bilateral trade and MP that we use to calibrate the model across a set of OECD countries. Our counterfactual exercises shed light on the effect of falling MP costs, and the entry of China into world markets, on welfare between and within countries. |
| JEL: | F1 F23 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18972&r=knm |