The relationship between knowledge investments, innovation and competitiveness is an important topic in both academic research and economic policy and has been studied extensively over the past decades. Nowadays, investments in private and public R&D are believed to make up the heart of a modern knowledge economy. The present paper adopts an evolutionary economics perspective and investigates w...

This paper reports from a case study of an IT innovation consortium in the field of elderly home healthcare. The circumstance of the consortium we studied includes that it was comprised of small-to-medium sized enterprises and targeted a public sector oriented market. We present six institutional constraints facing the heterogeneous innovation collective in the innovation creation process: proc...

The purpose of this paper is to theorise the changes surrounding the introduction of amanagement control innovation, total quality management (TQM) techniques, within Telecom Fiji Limited. Using institutional theory and drawing on empirical evidence from multiple sources including interviews, discussions and documents, the paper explicates the institutionalization of these TQM practices. The fo...

This data represents research activities carried out in Co. Offaly and Co. Mayo, Ireland, to identify farm household innovative diversification behavior and policy/institutional actor capacity roles in support. The data sets are overlain with household and agency data from the two study areas to describe levels of innovative diversification capacity by individual socio-economic farm household p...

A central debate in industrial policy today is that between proponents of large vertically integrated firms on the one hand and those of networks of small specialized producers on the other. This paper argues that neither institutional structure is the panacea its supporters claim. The menu of institutional alternatives is in fact quite large, and both firms and networks — of which there are se...

The (neo-)evolutionary model of a Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations focuses on the overlay of expectations, communications, and interactions that potentially feed back on the institutional arrangements among the carrying agencies. From this perspective, the evolutionary perspective in economics can be complemented with the reflexive turn from sociology. The combination pr...

An earlier paper [28] has suggested a conceptual framework for organizing the study of American history. The purpose of this paper is to see how business history, in particular, fits within that framework. The first section summarizes the earlier paper, calling particular attention to one of the points it makes, namely, that the modern corporation, or megacorp, as it emerged within the American...