Experience matters: The role of academic scientist mobility for industrial innovation

Research Summary: A learning‐by‐hiring approach is used to scrutinize scientists' mobility in relation to the recruiting firms' subsequent innovation output. Our starting point is that among firm hires, individuals with university research experience—hired from universities or firms—can be particularly valuable. However, conflicting institutional logics between academia and industry makes working with academic scientists challenging at times for firms. We suggest two solutions to this difficulty: hiring “ambidextrous” individuals with a mix of experience of university research and working for a technologically advanced firm, and a strong organizational research culture in the recruiting firm reflected by the presence of a scientist on the top management team. We track the mobility of R&D workers empirically using patent and linked employer‐employee data. Managerial Summary: An important way to make organizations more innovative is hiring individual researchers with the right types of skills and experience. We show that individuals with university research experience beyond their final degree are particularly likely to help boost firm‐level innovation output after hiring compared to R&D workers with other types of skills and experience. However, to obtain good returns to innovation from hiring such individuals, firms need a university research–friendly organizational culture when hiring individuals with university research experience, from either firms or academia.     

Political disagreement in the classroom: testing cultural theory through structured observation

The cultural theory pioneered by Dame Mary Douglas has been tested with a range of research methods, but it has not yet been made subject to a ‘structured observation’. This method has been developed in psychology and management studies, and is especially useful for testing cultural theory’s prediction that fatalistic, hierarchical, egalitarian, and individualistic ways of perceiving and justifying tend to emerge in group debates about pressing social and environmental issues. We present the results of a structured observation of this prediction. Groups of high school students (aged 17–19) were asked for their opinions concerning three to five ‘wicked’ (i.e., highly complex) problems, and to discuss how to resolve them. Each utterance was coded according to the rationalities proposed by cultural theory. The results confirm cultural theory’s hypothesis that all four specific ways of defining, perceiving and resolving a wicked problem emerge when a number of people debate such an issue. We also discuss how Douglas’ cultural theory can be further developed and tested. Finally, we use our study to outline how the method of structured observation can contribute to political culture research in general.     

The effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality: An empirical investigation using panel data

We use a panel data set that combines annual brand-level advertising expenditures for over three hundred brands with measures of brand awareness and perceived quality from a large-scale consumer survey to study the effect of advertising. Advertising is modeled as a dynamic investment in a brand’s stocks of awareness and perceived quality and we ask how such an investment changes brand awareness and quality perceptions. Our panel data allow us to control for unobserved heterogeneity across brands and to identify the effect of advertising from the time-series variation within brands. They also allow us to account for the endogeneity of advertising through recently developed dynamic panel data estimation techniques. We find that advertising has consistently a significant positive effect on brand awareness but no significant effect on perceived quality.

Is self-employment really a bad experience? : The effects of previous self-employment on subsequent wage-employment wages

We use propensity score matching methods to quantify the effects of past self-employment experience on subsequent earnings in dependent employment using data on the population of Danish men observed between 1990 and 1996. Our results generally confirm existing studies in that we find that a spell of self-employment is associated with lower hourly wages compared to workers who were consecutively wage-employed. We also show, however, that this effect disappears—and even becomes positive in some settings—for formerly self-employed who find dependent employment in the same sector as their self-employment sector. Hence, the on average negative effect of self-employment is rather caused by sector switching than by the self-employment experience per se. Moreover, formerly self-employed who either enjoyed a high income or hired at least one worker during their self-employment spell receive wages in subsequent dependent employment that are at least as high as for individuals who have been consecutively wage-employed.     

A note on outbound open innovation and firm performance

The concept of open innovation has attracted a lot of interest over the past decade. In light of a relative emphasis on inbound open innovation (indicating an outside‐in process) in prior research, this brief note addresses the relationship between outbound open innovation (indicating an inside‐out process) and firm performance. In particular, it suggests that outbound open innovation may have positive and negative effects on firm performance based on potential benefits and risks of transferring technology. To what degree these effects materialize depends on internal factors, e.g. desorptive capacity, and external factors, e.g. appropriability. Consequently, a proficient internal management of outbound open innovation is critical to avoid its potential risks and to capture its substantial benefits. In this regard, future research may substantially deepen the insights into the relevance and role of outbound open innovation.     

Google,Facebook, Amazon,eBay: Is the Internet driving competition or market monopolization?

This paper discusses the general characteristics of online markets from a competition theory perspective and the implications for competition policy. Three important Internet markets are analyzed in more detail: search engines, online auction platforms, and social networks. Given the high level of market concentration and the development of competition over time, we use our theoretical insights to examine whether (a) leading Internet platforms have non-temporary market power and, based on this analysis, (b) whether any specific market regulation beyond general competition law rules is warranted in these three online markets.