Firm heterogeneity within industries: How important is “industry” to innovation?

In this paper we assess how important “industry” is to innovation. Our empirical estimates suggest that “industry factors” matter little to how firms’ search for new innovations. These results offer empirical support to recent evolutionary theory where firms have heterogeneous capabilities and pursue different approaches to innovation. Structural variables at the industry level do however have a substantial influence on the firm level propensity to innovate. This result supports “sectoral innovation system” approaches where firms are “constrained” by technological regimes underlying industry evolution. Hence, the driving forces behind technological evolution are found at both the firm and industry level.

Outlining the distinguishing characteristics of an evolutionary theory of innovation

This paper discusses notions of theory in relation to evolutionary understandings of innovation. It starts by empirically demonstrating the relevance of evolutionary perspectives – broadly defined – for understanding the “basics of what’s going on” in the economic sphere when it comes to innovation. It continues to argue and show that appreciative evolutionary understandings of innovation are connected to the Darwinian processes of variation, selection and retention in the theoretical “high range”. Multilevel theorizing, where researchers move between different levels and degrees of abstraction is therefore a key feature of an evolutionary theory of innovation. The paper ends by identifying puzzles and research challenges that evolutionary reasoning with respect to innovation need to address.Innovation, evolutionary theory.

Access (not) granted: What kinds of firms participate in technology programs?

In this paper we focus on the participation stage and analyze what kinds of firms that are granted access to the 5 most important technology programs in Norway. Based upon a combination of logistic regression and factor analysis we find that the public support system for R&D in Norway is built around export oriented, innovative and larger firms. Technology programs support these firms with “research” and “development” subsidies in order to support the development of national champions.

Search Pathways to Innovation

Organizational search processes is an important source of firm level heterogeneity in evolutionary - behavioural theory. Combining insights from established and recent evolutionary-behavioural theory we propose that R&D and managerial perceptions constitute two distinct search pathways to innovation. R&D is in this context a measure of institutionalized routine based search, while managerial perception of problems captures situational and cognitive search. Using a new survey of industrial enterprises we find that these search pathways are related to product, process, organizational and market innovation at the firm level, although in a diverse way.

Norwegian Innovation and Industrial Structure: Insiders and Outsiders?

We examine the hypothesis that the Norwegian innovation system is locked-in to a specialization pattern of scale dependent, resource intensive industries, in which innovation depends mainly on the in-house activities of (a few) large firms. To this extent, we employ a sectoral empirical analysis using data on industrial dynamics and innovation in the Norwegian economy. Our results indicate that although the Norwegian economy has parts that are resourceand scale dependent, and also sectors in which the market structure is inert and concentrated, these characteristics are not systematically related to the level and nature of innovation activities. Our results indicate that innovation in Norway takes place in two main regimes: a highintensive and a low-intensive regime. This is not correlated systematically with industrial dynamics.

Hierarchical Network Design Using Simulated Annealing

The hierarchical network problem is the problem of nding the least cost net-work, with nodes divided into groups, edges connecting nodes in each groups and groups ordered in a hierarchy. The idea of hierarchical networks comes from telecommunication networks where hierarchies exist. Hierarchical net-works are described and a mathematical model is proposed for a two level version of the hierarchical network problem. The problem is to determine which edges should connect nodes, and how demand is routed in the net-work. The problem is solved heuristically using simulated annealing which as a sub-algorithm uses a construction algorithm to determine edges and route the demand. Performance for dierent versions of the algorithm are reported in terms of runtime and quality of the solutions. The algorithm is able to nd solutions of reasonable quality in approximately 1 hour for networks with 100 nodes

In search of innovation capability and its sources in local government organizations: a critical interpretative synthesis of the literature

Empirical research has identified a long list of antecedents that promote innovation in local government organizations. However, less is known about how and why diverse antecedents—as well as their interplay—stimulate local government organizations to innovate and create public value. We address this gap through a systematic and critical interpretive synthesis of the empirical literature on innovation and entrepreneurship in local government organizations. Our review advances theory development about public sector innovation processes by (1) showing how antecedents relate to each other across levels of analysis in a process model and (2) explicating why local government organizations generate/adopt innovation through innovation capability. Our emerging theory offers several contributions to the public sector innovation literature and a forward-looking research agenda

Playing 3D chess, or how firms can thrive under complexity : The mediating role of innovation capabilities in the use of innovation input

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