This book re-examines the rationale for public policy, concluding that the prevailing ‘public knowledge' model is evolving towards a networked or distributed model of knowledge production and use in which public and private institutions play complementary roles. It provides a set of tools and models to assess the impact of the new network model of funding and governance, and argues that governments need to adapt their funding and administrative priorities and procedures to support the emergence and healthy growth of research networks. The book goes on to explain that interdependencies and complementarities in the production and distribution of knowledge require a new and more contextual, flexible and complex approach to government funding, monitoring and assessment.

Links and Impacts: The Influence of Public Research on Industrial R&D

Numerous publications are dedicated to absorptive capacity and new product de- velopment (NPD). Most are centered on the recipient team, and very few consider the effects of the source team knowledge characteristics on the knowledge absorp- tion and the NPD performance. This paper analyzes the type of the external knowledge sourced from outside the organization and the process through which it is used by the recipient firm and the effect on NPD performance. This is done through a specific type of source team knowledge, the design, and through the NPD process in industries (clothing and construction) where it plays a key role. NPD cases were analyzed and clustered in three categories of design absorption processes. From these categories, a conceptual framework of the source-recipient knowledge com- plementarity and its impact on theNPDperformance is proposed. The main result is that the complementarity between the recipient and the source knowledge is a crit- ical aspect of the absorption process and therefore of the NPD performance. From a managerial perspective, this research highlights the role of design in the NPD pro- cess and how the combination of design knowledge with prior knowledge (marketing or technological) is related to NPD performance.

Absorptive Capacity and Source-Recipient Complementarity in Designing New Products: An Empirically Derived Framework

Radical innovations: Between established knowledge and future research opportunities

Research analyzing the importance of human capital for innovation usually focuses on secondary and tertiary education. This paper takes a different perspective by focusing on in-firm training. We argue that continuous training guarantees access to leading-edge knowledge and thus increases a firm’s propensity to innovate. Using German establishment-level data, we show a strong association between lagged continuous training and innovation. Applying instrumental variable methods, we cautiously argue that the association between training and innovation is indeed a causal effect. In the quest for a relevant and valid instrument, we exploit legal regulations of the German Works Constitution Act.

Training and innovation

Amid increasing interest in firm age and its effects on firm performance, this special issue offers an exhaustive review of the literature and a novel collection of evidence on the effects of firm age on performance, including a special focus of interest on innovation performance, financial performance, exports, survival and growth. This editorial positions the theme in the extant literature, and provides key definitions and challenges ahead in the field of evolutionary economics. It introduces the collection of articles composing the special issue. The papers offer a diversity of country contexts, as well as analytical approaches and methods. They include an exhaustive review of the literature on age and firms' performance, and present original empirical studies focusing on the effects of age on firms' economic outcomes on the one hand, and on innovation outcomes on the other hand. While most of the papers use econometric analysis, the level of analysis ranges from firm to individual.

Firm age and performance

Product innovation and employees’ slack time. The moderating role of firm age & size

The capacity to generate knowledge and disseminate it in a firm is considered a primary strategic competence to attaining competitive gain. Knowledge literature reveals how relevant it is to increa...

Stephen Kehinde Medase

Papers

Product innovation and employees’ slack time. The moderating role of firm age & size

Employees’ heterogeneous qualifications, internal r&d, formal training and innovation performance