Does technological change amount to accumulation of general, and so transferable, human capital? To approach this question I rely on a theoretical framework in which the “technology distance” between industries reduces inter-industry transferability of workers’ skill. Empirically, I use US panel data on individual intra-industry and inter-industry mobility decisions between 1982 and 1990, a per...

Although standards can inhibit innovation under certain circumstances, recent research shows that, more generally, they play critical roles in supporting technological innovation and industrial emergence. Hence, there has been an increasing interest in advancing knowledge of the roles of standards in emerging technologies; however, there is as yet limited understanding of how and when different...

In the past decades technological innovations in many scientific fields, such as molecular biology, biochemistry electrophysiology and histochemistry have facilitated enormously the degree of resolution of independent variables, in addition to accelerating the production of results and read-out parameters. Consequently, this has resulted in new scientific insights. Similarly, a lot of technolog...

BACKGROUND Traditional government policies suggest that upstream investment in scientific research is necessary and sufficient to generate technological innovations. The expected downstream beneficial socio-economic impacts are presumed to occur through non-government market mechanisms. However, there is little quantitative evidence for such a direct and formulaic relationship between public in...

C hristensen’s (1997) original theory focused on disruptive technologies. Over time, the same theory has been used to explain all kinds of disruptive innovations. This is a mistake. Different kinds of innovations have different competitive effects and produce different kinds of markets. They should be treated as distinct phenomena. This article summarizes what the academic literature has to say...

The adoption of innovations based on information and communications technologies (ICT) produces three types of transformations in companies. First off, ICTs can reduce transaction costs, which include those of coordination, information, motivation, control and supervision. Technological innovations can also contribute to the development of new capabilities within the company. Furthermore, ICT-b...

For several decades, marketing researchers have stressed that firms can achieve competitive advantage by creating superior value for customers through innovation. However the literature on entrepreneurship and innovation based competitive strategy is deficient in several important respects. First, entrepreneurship has been poorly measured in the past. Next, research on innovation is biased towa...

This paper proposes a framework based on which innovations in wind power technologies can be evaluated from the standpoint of their contribution to diffusion expansion. The framework helps build up a missing link between the technical literature on innovations and policy-oriented contributions concerned with the diffusion potential of wind power in national energy systems. The ideas are applied...

Getting innovations adopted is often difficult. Not because they lack obvious advantages, but because of the complex nature of the adoption and diffusion process. If everyone included in their strategy, the six elements of the ‘innovation diffusion mix’ identified in this study, adoption and diffusion would be much easier. Résumé: Faire adopter des innovations est souvent difficile. Non parce q...