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- Research on markets for inventions and implications for R&D allocation strategiesPublication . Conti, Raffaele; Gambardella, Alfonso; Novelli, ElenaSeveral streams of literature have examined the phenomenon of “markets for inventions”, that is, the trade of elements of knowledge which are “disembodied” from individuals, organizations, and products. The aims of this paper are to bring together the various streams of research in this area and discuss their major assumptions and limitations, in order to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the phenomenon, and identify promising paths for future research. We start our review by identifying the object of market exchange—that is, an invention whose knowledge has been codified and disembodied from individuals, organizations, or artifacts. We then identify those factors that enable firms to trade inventions, distinguishing between institutional-, firm-, and industry-level factors. We close our analysis of the extant literature by discussing the implications of markets for inventions for firm behavior and performance. Against this background, we highlight an important avenue for future research. A neglected implication of the development of invention markets is that firms are confronted with a wide variety of technological paths from which to choose, because the opportunity to acquire technologies on the market offers them a greater variety that can their internal R&D departments. However, the streams of research on markets for inventions and on R&D allocation strategies have been surprisingly disconnected so far. Hence, in the final section, we start to establish and explore the link between these literatures, and to identify a research agenda in this domain.
- Discrimination and entrepreneurship: evidence from LGBT rights lawsPublication . Conti, Raffaele; Kacperczyk, Olenka; Valentini, GiovanniThis study revisits the well-established claim that reducing discrimination spurs entrepreneurial entry. We propose that the effect of antidiscrimination initiatives on entrepreneurship depends crucially on whether discrimination originates on the demand- or the supply-side of the entrepreneurial process. The benefits of antidiscrimination practices in the context of entry are based on the study of the demand-side discrimination, or bias which arises when prospective entrepreneurs face discrimination by key resource providers for a new venture (i.e., investors, banks, prospective employers). We hypothesize the opposite effect on the supply-side, or when prospective entrepreneurs face discrimination in paid employment. Using evidence from the enactment of LGBT antidiscrimination policies, we show that initiatives to reduce employer discrimination deter entry into entrepreneurship because they increase the appeal of paid employment relative to entrepreneurship. Despite the reduction in the rates of entrepreneurship, however, new ventures growth orientation increases because antidiscrimination policies motivate the pursuit of higher-potential opportunities.
- Specializing in generality: firm strategies when intermediate markets workPublication . Conti, Raffaele; Gambardella, Alfonso; Novelli, ElenaThis paper studies the relationship between two decisions shaping the organizational configuration of a firm: whether to make the upstream resources more general and deployable to more markets (versus keeping them tailored to a few markets) and whether to trade with downstream firms as an upstream supplier of intermediate products and services (versus directly entering downstream markets). Although the literature has looked at these two decisions separately, we argue that they depend on each other. This has the important implication that they can generate organizational complementarities, inducing firms to implement them jointly. We are motivated in particular by the observation that an increasing number of firms invest in general upstream resources and exploit them as upstream suppliers of intermediate services or products-a strategy that we refer to as specialization in generality. Interestingly, prior literature has mostly highlighted the use of general upstream resources to enter new downstream markets.We identify the supply and demand conditions under which specialization in generality is instead more likely to emerge: lack of prior downstream assets on the supply side and a roughly equal distribution of buyers across intermediate markets (a "broad" demand) on the demand side.We test our predictions using a sample of firms in the U.S. laser industry between 1993 and 2001.Aregulatory shock that increases the value of trading relative to downstream entry provides the setting for a quasi-natural experiment, which corroborates our theoretical predictions.