Morpheus – Remote Access to Micro Data with a Quality Measure

Morpheus is a novel approach in providing remote access to micro data of official statistics. Researchers work on anonymous micro data files with common statistical software packages and get their results back in real time. Additionally, a measure of goodness of fit will be provided for every single result. Therefore researchers can work with the anonymous results as they can have confidence that they would have obtained the same or very similar results with the original data. All statistical analyses and all commands are allowed. Furthermore, users can browse through the anonymous data which is very helpful when developing program syntax and not possible in most other systems of remote access. Research data centres would greatly benefit from such a system as well, as the cumbersome manual disclosure control would be eliminated. All results would be safe and automatically returned to the researcher. This system would respect the special requirements to micro data access even in Germany where laws are especially strict.Morpheus ist ein neuartiger Ansatz, einen echten Fernzugriff auf Mikrodaten der amtlichen Statistik zu gewähren. Wissenschaftler werten mit den üblichen Statistik-Softwarepaketen einen anonymen Datensatz aus und erhalten ihre Ergebnisse in Echtzeit zurück. Zusätzlich erhalten sie zu jedem einzelnen Ergebnis ein Gütemaß. Obwohl die Wissenschaftler mit den anonymen Ergebnissen arbeiten, können sie dadurch sicher sein, dass sie das gleiche oder ein sehr ähnliches Ergebnis mit den Originaldaten erhalten hätten. Alle statistischen Analysen sind erlaubt. Darüber hinaus können sich die Wissenschaftler d ie anonymen Daten anschauen. Dies ist sehr hilfreich, wenn man Programme entwickelt und es ist in den meisten anderen Remote-Access-Systemen bisher nicht möglich. Forschungsdatenzentren würden von solch einem System ebenfalls in großem Maße profitieren, da die mühsame manuelle Geheimhaltungsprüfung entfallen würde. Alle Ergebnisse wären sicher und werden automatisch dem Wissenschaftler zugesandt. Dieses System würde die strengen gesetzlichen Datenschutzvorgaben für den Zugang zu Mikrodaten in Deutschland erfüllen

Organizational design choices of high-tech startups-How middle management drives innovation performance

Research Summary Innovative products and services are the inspiration for many startups. However, founders find that the management of existing operations competes with the attention that they can devote to innovation. We investigate whether and how establishing a middle management level frees up attention for innovation when firms are newly started. We argue that middle management is positively related to introducing product innovations and that the effect is stronger when founders have larger stocks of pre‐existing knowledge and when the startup's industry provides more innovation opportunities. These hypotheses are supported by an analysis of 2,431 German high‐tech startups founded between 2005 and 2012. Managerial Summary Most high‐tech entrepreneurs acknowledge that an overload of managerial tasks keeps them from advancing innovation in their startups. However, they are often times reluctant to introduce middle management because of a fear that the resulting bureaucratization will stifle innovation. Our study shows that these fears are not justified. Instead, we find for 2,431 high‐tech startups in Germany that startups with middle managers are significantly more innovative than those without. While middle managers might be a roadblock for innovation in large firms, startups benefit from having them. Founders are the central decision makers in startups and can easily be overburdened with management tasks. Middle managers can alleviate parts of this workload and allow founders to focus on creating innovative products and services

Drivers and Effects of Internationalising Innovation by SMEs

This paper investigates the drivers and the effects of the internationalisation of innovation activities in SMEs based on a large data set of German firms covering the period 2002-2007. We look at different stages of the innovation process (R&D, design, production and sales of new products, and implementation of new processes) and explore the role of internal resources, home market competition and innovationrelated location advantages for an SME’s decision to engage in innovation activities abroad. By linking international innovation activities to firm growth in the home market we try to identify likely internationalisation effects at the firm level. The results show that export experience and experience in knowledge protection are highly important for international innovation activities of SMEs. Fierce home market competition turns out to be rather an obstacle than a driver. High innovation costs stimulate internationalisation of non-R&D innovation activities, and shortage of qualified labour expels production of new products. R&D activities abroad and exports of new products spur firm growth in the home market while there are no negative effects on home market growth from shifting production of new products abroad

From green technology development to green innovation: inducing regulatory adoption of pathogen detection technology for sustainable forestry

Technological entrepreneurship has been widely acknowledged as a key driver of modern industrial economies, and more recently, a panacea for environmental and social problems. However, our current understanding of how green-technology ventures emerge and diffuse more sustainable innovations remains limited. We advance theory on green entrepreneurship by drawing on institutional work to refine and extend our understanding of how entrepreneurs may influence government policies and practices in their attempts to diffuse green technology. We develop a theoretical framework that combines institutional work with a search tool, the technological, commercial, organizational, and societal (TCOS) framework of innovative uncertainties, which identifies key opportunities, hurdles, and potential unintended consequences at early stages of technology development. We present a detailed case study of a potential university-based green-tech venture developing pathogen detection technology for forestry protection. Foreign pathogens spread by international trade can have major detrimental impacts on forests and the industries that rely on them. Our analysis found that green technology demonstrating technological feasibility is necessary but not sufficient; green-tech ventures must also engage in institutional work, in this case, articulating the technology’s benefits to regulators to establish legitimacy and avoid misuse that can hinder its adoption. We thus add to previous studies by emphasizing that institutional work could be a main activity for a green-tech venture, a core entrepreneurial strategy rather than an afterthought

Wages in high-tech start-ups - do academic spin-offs pay a wage premium?

Due to their origin from universities, academic spin‐offs operate at the forefront of the technological development. Therefore, spin‐offs exhibit a skill‐biased labour demand, i.e. spin‐offs have a high demand for employees with cutting edge knowledge and technical skills. In order to accommodate this demand, spin‐offs may have to pay a relative wage premium compared to other high‐tech start‐ups. However, neither a comprehensive theoretical assessment nor the empirical literature on wages in start‐ups unambiguously predicts the existence and the direction of wage differentials between spin‐offs and non‐spin‐offs. This paper addresses this research gap and examines empirically whether or not spin‐offs pay their employees a wage premium. Using a unique linked employer‐employee data set of German high‐tech start‐ups, we estimate Mincer‐type wage regressions applying the Hausman‐Taylor panel estimator. Our results show that spin‐offs do not pay a wage premium in general. However, a notable exception from this general result is that spin‐offs that commercialise new scientific results or methods provide higher wages to employees with linkages to the university sector – either as university graduates or as student workers