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.     

Knowledge diversity and coordination: The effect of intrafirm inventor task networks on absorption speed

Research Summary: We combine the absorptive capacity and social network theory approaches to predict how intrafirm “whole” network characteristics affect the firm's speed of absorption of external knowledge to produce inventions. We start from the widely accepted view that distant, externally‐developed knowledge is difficult to absorb into the focal firm's own knowledge production. We suggest that high levels of intrafirm inventor task network diversity and task network density are essential for a diversity of knowledge inputs and coordinated actions regarding knowledge transfer, which in turn, reduces problems related to the absorption of knowledge—especially in the case of knowledge that is distant from the focal firm. The results of an event history study of 113 pharmaceutical firms that engaged in technology in‐licensing from 1986 to 2003 provide general support for our hypotheses. Managerial Summary: Firms keen to keep up with an uncertain and ever‐changing industry environment, can benefit from the speedy introduction of inventions. We examine how firms absorb licensed‐in technologies to nurture the rapid development of own related inventions. We show that a firm's absorption speed depends on the characteristics of the internal collaboration networks among the firm's inventor employees. More specifically, technologically diverse and well‐connected inventor networks improve the firm's ability to absorb external technologies quickly. This applies especially to externally acquired technologies that are unfamiliar to the firm. Depending on the distance of the acquired technology from the focal firm combined with speed‐inducing inventor network characteristics, our estimates suggest that firms can reduce the time needed for absorption by several months.     

The Importance of Sectoral Differences in the Application of Complementary HRM Practices for Innovation Performance

Recent theoretical and empirical analysis in the field of economic organization has focused almost exclusively on identifying organizational practices and complementarities between such practices, without regard for the type of activity in question. However, organizational theory suggests that more knowledge-intensive production activities often involve higher degrees of strategic uncertainty for firms and performance ambiguity in relation to individual employees. Therefore, the 'organic' or 'clan' form of organization - involving the application of 'new' HRM practices - is expected to perform better within knowledge-intensive sectors of the economy, as compared to other sectors. A sample of 726 Danish firms with more than 50 employees in manufacturing and private services is studied. The results show that HRM practices are more effective in influencing innovation performance when applied together, as compared with situations in which individual practices are applied alone. In other words, organizational complementarities obtain. Moreover, the application of complementary HRM practices is more effective for firms in knowledge-intensive industries ('high' and 'medium' knowledge-intensive industries).     

The integrated programme for commodities

The gains from stabilizing commodity prices are likely to be rather small. The distribution of such gains among producers and consumers is uncertain. Compensatory financing is a cheaper and more effective means of dealing with the problem of fluctuating export earnings. The developing countries have some scope for cartel pricing in the tropical beverages, but hardly in any of the other ten ‘core’ commodities. A common fund is not an economically essential feature of the commodity programme, and will not lead to savings in terms of resources. As a group the ‘core’ commodities do not face serious import barriers in the developed countries. In sum, the integrated commodity programme, if implemented, may produce some, but probably rather limited benefits to the developing countries. Some of these could be at the cost of the developed countries, and it is not clear if the whole scheme is a positive-negative-, or zero-sum game.     

Fatal occupational accidents in Danish fishing vessels 1989-2005

The purpose of the study was to study the circumstances and incidence rates of fatal accidents in inspection obligated and non-inspection obligated Danish fishing vessels to identify areas for prevention. Information about the fatalities came from maritime authority reports, including vessel disaster reports, post mortem reports, maritime inquiries and police reports. The person- and vessel years at risk came from the Danish Directorate of Fisheries. During the period 1989-2005, 114 fatalities occurred. Sixty-one of the fatalities occurred in 36 vessel disasters mainly caused by foundering/capsizing due to stability changes in rough weather and collisions; 39 fatal occupational accidents mainly occurred on the larger inspection obligated trawlers during fishing. In the remaining 14 other fatal accidents, the main causal factors were difficult embarking/disembarking conditions by darkness in foreign ports and alcohol intoxication. In the period 1995-2005, the overall incidence rate was 10 per 10,000 fishermen per year with no down-going trend during that period. The fatal accident rates are still too high, despite the efforts to reduce the risk. Increased focus on regular and repeated safety training for all fishermen and improved safety measures are needed, especially in the underscored areas of sea disasters concerning small vessels and occupational accidents on big vessels. Better registration of time at risk for fishermen is needed to validate the effect of the safety measures.     

Structural Change in OECD Export Specialisation Patterns: de-specialisation and ‘stickiness’

This paper examines whether the OECD countries are characterised by a high degree of stability of their export specialisation patterns at the country level or not. Furthermore, we test whether the countries have become more or less specialised. In this context we distinguish between specialisation (or de-specialisation) in trade patterns on the one hand, and divergence (or, on the contrary, convergence) on the other. A specialisation process refers to a process in which specialisation intra-country becomes more dispersed (and counter-wise for de-specialisation). In contrast, a divergence process refers to a process in which countries become more different in terms of specialisation in a particular sector, across countries (and counter-wise for convergence). We examine the sensitivity for the level of aggregation, and we apply a period of nearly three decades from 1965 to 1992. Twenty OECD countries are considered. The intra-country results show that the national specialisation patterns are rather sticky, although there is a tendency for countries to de-specialise in the medium to long term. The sector-wise results display convergence both in terms of β-and σ-convergence. In conclusion, we discuss the results (de-specialisation in particular) in the context of economic integration, and furthermore we contrast the findings with similar exercises conducted on structural change in technological specialisation.     

The importance of technology-based intersectoral linkages for market share dynamics

The Importance of Technology-Based Intersectoral Linkages for Market Share Dynamics. — The paper introduces technology-based intersectoral linkages (or technological spillovers) in an empirical model of international market share dynamics. The Pavitt taxonomy is applied as a yardstick for interpreting the empirical results. Overall, the results appear to be broadly consistent with the criteria behind the taxonomy, on the relative importance of the different factors of competitiveness in the different sectors. In particular, unit labour costs appear to play the largest role in supplier-dominated industries, ‘own sector’ technological activity plays the largest role in science-based industries, upstream linkages in scale-intensive and downstream linkages in specialized-supplier types of industries.     

Open for innovation: the role of openness in explaining innovation performance among U.K. manufacturing firms

A central part of the innovation process concerns the way firms go about organizing search for new ideas that have commercial potential. New models of innovation have suggested that many innovative firms have changed the way they search for new ideas, adopting open search strategies that involve the use of a wide range of external actors and sources to help them achieve and sustain innovation. Using a large‐scale sample of industrial firms, this paper links search strategy to innovative performance, finding that searching widely and deeply is curvilinearly (taking an inverted U‐shape) related to performance. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do export and technological specialisation patterns co-evolve in terms of convergence or divergence? Evidence from 19 OECD countries, 1971–1991

Several researchers looking at the development of international export specialisation patterns have shown that there is a weak tendency for OECD countries to exhibit decreased levels of specialisation. This finding is in contrast to findings made by other authors, who found increasing technological specialisation. The first aim of this paper is to investigate whether these contradictory findings are due to a `real world' phenomenon, or whether the explanation is purely technical, by comparing the development of export specialisation to specialisation in terms of US patents, using the same methodology and level of aggregation. The second aim is to analyse the extent to which countries and sectors display stable specialisation patterns over time, also both in terms of exports and in terms of technology. The paper confirms that the OECD countries tend in general to become less specialised in terms of exports. The evidence is less conclusive with regard to technological specialisation, as the results are mixed in the sense that just about half of the countries tend to exhibit increased levels of specialisation, while the other half tend to exhibit lower levels of specialisation. In terms of country and sectoral stability of specialisation patterns, it can be concluded that both trade specialisation and technological specialisation patterns are path-dependent. In comparison, however, trade specialisation patterns are more stable than are technological specialisation patterns.