Knowledge that Transforms

We propose a combinatorial model of economic development. An economy develops by acquiring new capabilities allowing for the production of an ever greater variety of products of increasingly complex products. Taking into account that economies abandon the least complex products as they develop over time, we show that variety first increases and then decreases in the course of economic development. This is consistent with the empirical pattern known as 'the hump'. Our results question the common association of variety with complexity. We further discuss the implications of our model for future research.

Despite increasing concerns about the validity of published research, the issue of how the scientific community can maintain a high-quality body of research is not well understood. We consider the case of systematic reviews in health care, and explore whether risk of bias ratings communicated within these reviews may help shift scientists’ attention towards published research that is at a low risk of bias. We focus on publications deemed at risk of bias due to selective reporting; that is, scientific articles with high chances of systematic errors in the published research findings due to flaws in the reporting. Using a matched-sample control group we find that, after potential bias is signalled in systematic reviews, publications at high risk of bias attract less attention – as indicated by fewer follow-on citations – when compared to a control group of low risk of bias publications. We extend our analysis by considering those cases where risk of bias is unclear, and by examining how different features of the rating system may affect the magnitude of the main effect. The findings provide evidence about whether systematic reviews can play a role in signalling biases in the scientific literature, over and above their established role of synthesising prior research.

Whereas previous studies have not paid much attention to spatial units in buildings, and have merely measured diversity at the regional level, this study aims to calculate the industrial diversity in building units in the Seoul Metropolitan Area and examine the factors associated with such diversity using the multi-level model method. The results show that a vertical factory is an important industrial zone correlated strongly to diversity in building spaces. Industrial composition also positively associated with diversity. Industrial diversity tends to increase in technology-intensive industries, but decreases in traditional ones. Furthermore, this study reveals a pattern in which buildings with high diversity are spatially clustered in certain areas. Meanwhile, industrial parks have a negative association with diversity. High land prices also hinder the agglomeration of industries that aim for urban location, and may ultimately have a negative association with diversity.

This paper contributes to the literature on job polarizaton, whereby mid-skill jobs disappear because of increased mechanization and digitization of routine tasks. While the recent empirical literature has focused on the relative importance of technical change and globalization as the main drivers of job polarization, the role of within firm organizational changes has remained unexplored. Our study contributes to filling this gap by investigating how technological and organizational changes affect the mix of jobs within the firm. To this end we merge two firm level surveys from Denmark and add registry data to gain detailed knowledge of changes in the firms’ occupational structure. We construct measures of work organization in line with previous research and using a translog model we show that changes in work organization are associated with polarization by substituting and complementing different skill groups, even in the absence of technological change and changes in offshoring. The results show not only that the organizational level is central to understanding possible trends towards job polarization, but also demonstrate that changes in work organization often co-occur with changes in technology and in offshoring behavior, leading to interactions effects between organizational change, and technology and offshoring on job polarization.

This study investigated that innovative service firms adopt complementary-in use appropriability strategies in response to loose appropriability conditions. We used two features, i.e., appropriability breadth and appropriability depth, to examine different modes of complementary-in use appropriability strategies. We categorized 307 innovative service firms using a two-stage clustering analysis to identify distinct appropriability modes. The following four appropriability modes of complementary-in use appropriability strategies are identified: (1) complementary-based appropriability mode, (2) formal-based appropriability mode, (3) informal-based appropriability mode, and (4) low-profile appropriability mode. We revealed that complementary-in use appropriability strategies under loose appropriability conditions are appropriability modes adopted by innovative service firms that vary in appropriability breadth and appropriability depth. Appropriability breadth was significantly associated with the choice of appropriability modes. In addition, we revealed that innovative service firms’ choice of the modes of complementary-in use appropriability strategies varies by the firm characteristics. Finally, policy implications for enhancing innovation protection and value appropriation in service firms and sectors are discussed.

The benefits that consumer innovators create for their environment are well established, unlike the benefits that they gain from it. This quantitative empirical study investigates how job-related resources (i.e., knowledge, energy and inspiration acquired at work) spill over into household-sector (HHS) innovations. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, the study (1) sheds light on how job innovativeness and job boredom, as two examples of high vs. low job requirements, may contribute to the acquisition of job-related resources, and (2) explores how the job-related resources affect the outcomes of HHS innovation efforts developed during leisure time. Whereas being confronted with innovativeness at work increases the acquisition of job-related resources, experiencing boredom at work only benefits consumer innovators who have longer organizational tenures. Furthermore, the job-related resources positively affect HHS innovation outcomes in terms of novelty, general use value, and technical feasibility. Thus, results indicate that consumer innovators’ work environment can enhance the development of HHS innovations by fostering innovativeness but also ensuring realization. These insights underscore the importance of studying consumer innovators’ work environment to find ways to encourage HHS innovation activities.

We propose that in an era of ferment, when a firm's product design does not possess the features of the evolving dominant design, it faces a feature implementation gap defined as 'the number of features of the evolving product dominant design that are absent from a firm's product design'. Employing the performance feedback perspective of the behavioral theory of the firm, we conceptualize a feature implementation gap as a manifestation of an aspiration-performance gap that negatively affects a firm's likelihood of product market survival due to a product market 'lock-out'. To dynamically improve the alignment of their product designs with the evolving dominant design and increase their likelihood of product market survival, we suggest that firms engage in problematic search using alliances and acquisitions to decrease the feature implementation gap. We found strong support for our predictions using a longitudinally dynamic mediation model with data from an era of ferment in the digital camera product market between 1997-2004. Our study extends the behavioral theory of the firm to a novel context - eras of ferment. It demonstrates that in this context, problemistic search involved dual search modes- short-run search at the individual feature level and long-run search at the design level. It also shows the utility of adopting a demand-side (i.e. product market or customer based) perspective to explain how firms improve their likelihood of product market survival during eras of ferment. In this, it complements recent research that has examined how firms’ internal actions affect product design realignment processes and firm outcomes in eras of ferment.

Patent thickets have been identified as a major stumbling block in the development of new technologies, creating the need to accurately identify thicket membership. Various citations-based methodologies (Graevenitz et al, 2011; Clarkson, 2005) have been proposed, which have relied on broad survey results (Cohen et al, 2000) for validation. Expert evaluation is an alternative direct method of judging thicket membership at the individual patent level. While this method potentially is robust to drafting and jurisdictional differences in patent design, it is also costly to use on a large scale. We employ a natural language processing technique, which does not carry these large costs, to proxy expert views closely. Furthermore, we investigate the relation between our semantic measure and citation based measures, finding them quite distinct. We then combine a variety of thicket indicators into a statistical model to assess the probability that a newly added patent belongs to a thicket. We also study the role each measure plays, as part of creating a prospective screening model that could improve efficiency of the patent system, in response to Lemley (2001).

Industries with emerging market categories offer greater opportunities for firms to innovate. However, such opportunities are not a matter of “the more, the better.” An increasing number of emerging market categories poses a dilemma. While more emerging market categories arguably bring about increasing growth opportunities, they can also generate greater ambiguity for incumbent firms, which may hinder their innovation efforts. This study attempts to address this dilemma by proposing that the number of emerging market categories in an industry will have an inverted U-shaped relationship with incumbent firms’ innovation efforts. We further argue that this curvilinear relationship will be influenced by the socio-cognitive context of a firm's focal industry, in the sense that the degree of collective identity incoherence at the industry level will intensify the proposed inverted U-shaped relationship, whereas the prevalence of trade associations in the industry will depress this relationship. We test our hypotheses by examining research and development (R&D) investments of a sample of U.S. high-technology manufacturing firms and find support for our main prediction and the hypothesized effect of collective identity incoherence. We also find a surprising but intriguing moderating effect of trade associations.

In this paper, we analyze the compelling issue of monetary valuation of a scientific publication. While many academic scholars tend to overlook the topic, as being either too difficult or even meaningless, policymakers begin to use very rough tools for evaluating publications, which have many limitations, as we will discuss in this work. The main objective of this work is to address this open problem by stimulating further discussion on the topic and future research developments. We provide an overview of different methods to value scientific publications. We discuss their main hypotheses, pros and cons by means of an illustration based on Sapienza University of Rome. Although we begin to address the issue of monetary valuation of scientific publications, presenting a range of available methods and listing the limits and benefits of each, further methodological and empirical research is still needed to comply with policy and stakeholders' needs which we expect will increase in the near future.