Industry Life Cycle and the Evolution of an Industry Network

This paper addresses the problem of the general validity of models of the industry life cycle, which have been proposed to analyse the long-term evolution of many industries, exhibiting a typical pattern of shakeout. We study a case of non shake-out in the commercial jet aero-engine industry, marked by a small number of entry events distributed over 40 years of industry evolution, by no exits and by a resulting slowly increasing number of firms. We argue that the vertical structure of the industry, as represented by the network of vertical relations between aero-engine suppliers and aircraft manufacturers, "regulated" the process of entry and exit and posed the conditions for a non shakeout to take place.industry life cycle; entry, exit; network; vertical relations

Why open source software can succeed

The paper discusses three key economic problems raised by the emergence and diffusion of Open source software: motivation, coordination, and diffusion under a dominant standard. First, the movement took off through the activity of a software development community that deliberately did not follow profit motivations. Second, a hierarchical coordination emerged without the support of an organization with proprietary rights. Third, Linux and other open source systems diffused in an environment dominated by established proprietary standards, which benefited from significant increasing returns. The paper shows that recent developments in the theory of critical mass in the diffusion of technologies with network externality may help to explain these phenomena.Open Source, Diffusion, Network Externality.

Network Structure and Industrial Dynamics. The long-term evolution of the aircraft-engine industry

This paper proposes a new approach to explain the long-term evolution of a supplier industry. The network of vertical relations between suppliers and buyers is identified as a determinant of the concentration of the supplier industry and of the dynamics of market shares. The vertical structure of the industry is captured by collecting information on all vertical relations between dyads of firms and by building matrices of interaction for the aircraft-engine industry from 1953 to 1997. An econometric exercise is used to test some hypotheses about the relation between selected network measures and industrial dynamics.industrial dynamics; vertically-related industries; network; industrial concentration; market shares.

Innovation and Standards in Clinical Practice: The Case of HIV Treatments

The goal of this study was to analyze the emergence of treatment standards associated with the adoption of anti-HIV drug innovations in the empirical setting of Italian clinical practice. Due to the rapid pace of technological change and the initial uncertainty concerning capabilities and indications of new treatments, the emergence of standard patterns of care turned out to be far from predictable and straightforward. Health providers' links to an international medicine and their internal coordination mechanisms were found to be associated with clinical decisions. Effectiveness and health costs of diverging treatment strategies were also compared.Medical innovation, Treatment standard, Clinical guidelines, HIV/AIDS, Sequence analysis

Increasing returns and network structure in the evolutionary dynamics of industries

The paper explores the idea that properties at the level of firms coevolve with more aggregate properties at the level of market institutions in the dynamics of industries. We propose that the structure of network of vertical relations limits the effect of increasing returns at the firm level. The paper develops a set of empirical measures and discusses a detailed case study of the commercial jet engine industry. The analysis of the structural dynamics of the network of vertical relations between engine suppliers and airframe manufacturers during the history of the industry (1958-1997) explains a final configuration of the industry marked by the coexistence of increasing returns to investments in R&D and marketing activities, with an intense competition among a few large incumbents, a low level of concentration and a strong instability of market shares. The emergence of a hierarchical network with a core and a periphery leads to equalisation of technical and market opportunities within the core and prevents incumbents to exit the industry.increasing returns; concentration; market shares; aircraft-engine industry; vertical relations; network.

Learning, technological competition and network structure in the aero-engine industry

This paper provides a novel contribution for specifying the role of demand for technological competition. The focus is on the analysis of the mechanisms of technological learning and spillovers occurring in different structures of networks of vertically-related industries. The paper offers a detailed and original empirical analysis of technological competition among suppliers and structure of the network of two vertically related-industries, namely the commercial jet and turboprop aero-engine and aircraft industries. Technological performances of actors are measured through measures of output of the technological activity.-

The long term evolution of vertically-related industries

The paper develops the argument that the long-term structural evolution of an industry depends on the evolution of a vertically-related, downstream industry. We analyse two pairs of vertically-related industries, the jet and turboprop aircraft and engine industries, since the first introduction of the jet and turboprop technologies to 1998. The paper shows that the evolutionary dynamics of the downstream industry, in terms of number of firms and products, entry, exit and concentration, is transmitted to the upstream industry via the structure of the network of vertical exchange relations. We identify two network configurations, partitioned and hierarchical, and show that they are responsible for sharply different transmission effects. An econometric analysis is carried out to demonstrate this difference in the turboprop and jet markets.vertically-related industries; network; industrial concentration; entry; exit.

Scientific and Technological Regimes in Nanotechnology: Combinatorial Inventors and Performance

Academics and policy makers are questioning about the relation between science and technology in the emerging field of nano science and technology (NST) and the effectiveness of different institutional regimes. We analyze the performance of inventors in the NST using multiple indicators. We clustered patents in three groups according to the scientific curricula of the inventors. The first two groups are composed by patents whose inventors respectively are all authors of at least one scientific publication in the NST and none of then has obtained a scientific publication in that field. Thirdly, we isolated those patents that have at least one inventor, who is also author of at least one scientific publication in the NST. The underlining presumption of this classification is that of a proxy of different institutional search regimes of the inventive activity; pure academic research, pure industrial R&D, and academic-industrial research partnerships.Science-Technology Relation, Emerging Field, Nanotechnology, Patent Quality, Inventive Productivity.

Causality and complexity in impact statements: is it time to rethink a one-size-fits-all approach to writing about impact?

As part of the REF assessment researchers across STEM and SSH disciplines are required to write about the impact of their research in essentially the same format. Drawing on a linguistic analysis of REF Impact statements from 2014, Andrea Bonaccorsi, highlights key differences between statements being made by scholars in STEM and SSH disciplines and suggests differences in the causality of impact between the disciplines warrant a reconsideration of how these statements are produced and judged

Knowledge, Spillovers and Firms’ International Growth. An Analysis at the Italian NUTS 3 Level

In the framework of analyses on the relationship between geography and technological innovation, the role of universities has received considerable attention. Both theoretical and empirical literature has shown that university research positively influences the capacity for innovation of the surrounding firms (Jaffe, 1989; Feldman, 1994; Acs et al, 2002). Universities play a central role in innovation processes both as the main responsible for basic research and also as forgers of human capital’s skills. Empirical work has highlighted that such effects radiate from major university centres crossing borders and administrative boundaries (Anselin et al., 1997). This paper focuses on the relationship between universities and the innovative capacity at the territorial level. Specifically, our empirical analysis investigates whether university research spillovers are highly localised or they rather flow across borders. Empirical literature has widely investigated intensity and directions of such spillovers, mainly within the theoretical framework of Griliches-Jaffe. However, we extend the empirical evidence exploring whether intensity and directions of spillovers depend on universities’ specificities (e.g. size, fields of specialization, fund rising capacity) and on the local absorptive capacity. The analysis is developed at the Italian NUTS3 level, using an explicit spatial econometric approach applied to a knowledge production function. References Acs, Z., Anselin, L., and Varga, A. (2002): “Patents and innovation counts as measures of regional production of new knowledgeâ€, Research Policy 31, pp. 1069-1085. Anselin, L., Varga, A., and Acs, Z. (1997): “Local geographic spillovers between University research and high technology innovationsâ€, Journal of Urban Economics 42, pp. 422-448. Feldman, M. (1994): The Geography of innovation, Kluwer Academic Publishers. Dordrecht. Jaffe, A. (1989): “Real effects of academic researchâ€, The American Economic Review, vol 79, n. 5, pp. 957-970.