This handbook looks to provide academics and students with a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the phenomenon of innovation. Innovation spans a number of fields within the social sciences and humanities: Management, Economics, Geography, Sociology, Politics, Psychology, and History. Consequently, the rapidly increasing body of literature on innovation is characterized by a multitude of perspectives based on, or cutting across, existing disciplines and specializations. Scholars of innovation can come from such diverse starting points that much of this literature can be missed, and so constructive dialogues missed. The editors of The Oxford Handbook of Innovation have carefully selected and designed twenty-one contributions from leading academic experts within their particular field, each focusing on a specific aspect of innovation. These have been organized into four main sections, the first of which looks at the creation of innovations, with particular focus on firms and networks. Section Two provides an account of the wider systematic setting influencing innovation and the role of institutions and organizations in this context. Section Three explores some of the diversity in the working of innovation over time and across different sectors of the economy, and Section Four focuses on the consequences of innovation with respect to economic growth, international competitiveness, and employment. An introductory overview, concluding remarks, and guide to further reading for each chapter, make this handbook a key introduction and vital reference work for researchers, academics, and advanced students of innovation. Contributors to this volume - Jan Fagerberg, University of Oslo William Lazonick, INSEAD Walter W. Powell, Stanford University Keith Pavitt, SPRU Alice Lam, Brunel University Keith Smith, INTECH Charles Edquist, Linkoping David Mowery, University of California, Berkeley Mary O'Sullivan, INSEAD Ove Granstrand, Chalmers Bjorn Asheim, University of Lund Rajneesh Narula, Copenhagen Business School Antonello Zanfei, Urbino Kristine Bruland, University of Oslo Franco Malerba, University of Bocconi Nick Von Tunzelmann, SPRU Ian Miles, University of Manchester Bronwyn Hall, University of California, Berkeley Bart Verspagen , ECIS Francisco Louca, ISEG Manuel M. Godinho, ISEG Richard R. Nelson, Mario Pianta, Urbino Bengt-Ake Lundvall, Aalborg

The Oxford Handbook of Innovation

The Rise of the Creative Class

Economics Of Discrimination

Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. For example, looking at disaggregated data on U.S. manufacturing industries, Syverson (2004a) found that plants at the 90th percentile produced four times as much as the plant in the 10th percentile on a per-employee basis. Only half of this difference in labor productivity could be accounted for by differential inputs, such as capital intensity. Syverson looked at industries defined at the four-digit level in the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system (now the North American Industry Classification System or NAICS) like 'Bakeries and Tortilla Manufacturing' or 'Plastics Product Manufacturing.' Foster, Haltiwanger, and Syverson (2008) show large differences in total factor productivity even within very homogeneous goods industries such as boxes and block ice. Some of these productivity differences across firms and plants are temporary, but in large part they persist over time. At the country level, Hall and Jones (1999) and Jones and Romer (2009) show how the stark differences in productivity across countries account for a substantial fraction of the differences in average per capita income. Both at the plant level and at the national level, differences in productivity are typically calculated as a residual-that is, productivity is inferred as the gap between output and inputs that cannot be accounted for by conventionally measured inputs.

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Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries

We propose an independence criterion based on the eigen-spectrum of covariance operators in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), consisting of an empirical estimate of the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of the cross-covariance operator (we term this a Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion, or HSIC). This approach has several advantages, compared with previous kernel-based independence criteria. First, the empirical estimate is simpler than any other kernel dependence test, and requires no user-defined regularisation. Second, there is a clearly defined population quantity which the empirical estimate approaches in the large sample limit, with exponential convergence guaranteed between the two: this ensures that independence tests based on HSIC do not suffer from slow learning rates. Finally, we show in the context of independent component analysis (ICA) that the performance of HSIC is competitive with that of previously published kernel-based criteria, and of other recently published ICA methods.

Measuring statistical dependence with Hilbert-Schmidt norms

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_809.pdf

Causal linkages between work and life satisfaction and their determinants in a structural VAR approach

http://www.lem.sssup.it/WPLem/files/2008-20.pdf

Growth processes of Italian manufacturing firms

We focus on the relationship between age and diversification patterns of German machine tool manufacturers in the post-war era. We distinguish between ‘minor diversification’ (adding a new product variation within a familiar submarket) and ‘major diversification’ (expanding the product portfolio into new submarkets). Our analysis reveals four main insights. First, we observe that firms have lower diversification rates as they grow older, and that eventually diversification rates even turn negative for old firms on average (where negative diversification corresponds to exit from certain product lines). Second, we find that product portfolios of larger firms tend to be more diversified. Third, with respect to consecutive diversification activities, quantile autoregression plots show that firms experiencing diversification in one period are unlikely to repeat this behavior in the following year. Fourth, survival estimations reveal that diversification activities reduce the risk of exit in general and to a varying degree at different ages. These results are interpreted using Penrosean growth theory.

Diversification patterns and survival as firms mature

A robust feature of the corporate growth process is the Laplace, or symmetric exponential, distribution of firm growth rates. In this paper, we sketch out a class of simple theoretical models capable of explaining this empirical regularity. We do not attempt to generalize on where growth opportunities come from, but rather we focus on how firms build upon growth opportunities. We base ourselves on Penrose's (1959) description of firm growth to explain how the interdependent nature of discrete resources may lead to the triggering off of a series of additions to a firm's resources. In a first formal model, we consider the case of employment growth in a hierarchy, and observe that growth rates follow an exponential distribution. In a second model, we include plant and capital as resources and we are able to reproduce a number of stylized facts about firm growth.

/pdf/firms-as-bundles-of-discrete-resources-towards-an-3kdf6eb7eg.pdf

Firms as bundles of discrete resources - towards an explanation of the exponential distribution of firm growth rates

High-growth firms (HGFs) make a considerable contribution to economic growth, and in recent years they have received increasing interest from entrepreneurship scholars. By analysing recent findings in the literature of high-growth firms, this study identifies some Stylized Facts, as well as contradictory findings, and also some unknowns regarding the determinants and internal strategies of HGFs, particularly on the persistence of their superior growth performance and the implications of recent findings for economic policy.

/pdf/high-growth-firms-stylized-facts-and-conflicting-results-4kfbqsual5.pdf

Alex Coad

Papers

Causal linkages between work and life satisfaction and their determinants in a structural VAR approach

Growth processes of Italian manufacturing firms

Diversification patterns and survival as firms mature

Firms as bundles of discrete resources - towards an explanation of the exponential distribution of firm growth rates

High-Growth Firms: Stylized Facts and Conflicting Results