DRUID16 Award Nominees
For more details on the nominated papers, click here
NOMINEES FOR THE 2016 DRUID BEST PAPER AWARD
Christoph Riedl and Victor Seidel: ”Design myopia and vicarious learning from good versus bad examples: Evidence from creative design competitions”
ABSTRACT: High-quality creative designs create tremendous value for organizations, but how do individual designers learn to produce better designs? Learning often presumes evaluation of performance that is objective and immediate, but in creative design evaluation is social and temporally displaced, providing hard-to- interpret signals for learning. Drawing on data from a ten-year panel of almost 180,000 T-shirt design submissions and 150 million design evaluations on an online crowdsourcing platform, we investigate how individuals learn from their own work and vicariously learn from observing others’ work. We find that in the absence of vicarious learning, individuals experience “design myopia” resulting in successively lower quality designs before reaching a positive learning rate. Furthermore, individuals learn from evaluating good examples of others, but they generally fail to learn from evaluating bad examples. We also find that experience helps individuals not only to gain high evaluations from others but also to learn to understand the “black box” of how designs are chosen for production. We discuss implications for the development of online crowdsourcing platforms and for the management of creative design more broadly.
Kenny Ching, Sean Schrauben and Martin Langner: ”Intellectual Property Protection and Industry Development: The Case of the Mountain Bike Industry”
ABSTRACT: This work employs a novel empirical approach in revisiting a core question in innovation and industry studies: what is the impact of formal intellectual property protection on industry development? In 1996, the inventor of the Horst Link suspension system failed to secure patent protection in Germany through accidental conditions. This technology, however, was fully patented in the US. We leverage this natural experiment to explore the complete innovative and product histories of all entrants to the multibillion-dollar mountain bicycle industry from 1981 to 2014. We find that German mountain bike firms may have benefited from this historical accident. Our regression estimates suggest that German firms relative to their US counterparts are associated with a 5 to 10% boost in innovation rate post 1996. Failure rates of German firms were also less than that of US firms. As a result, we propose that selective relaxation of formal intellectual property protection has the potential to provide stimulatory effects to industry development.
Neil C Thompson and Jeffrey Kuhn: ”Patent Races: Empirical evidence on when they happen and what impact they have on innovation”
ABSTRACT: This paper provides a first empirical look at patent racing, both at its prevalence and its effects. Long discussed in theory, this paper shows that patent racing is quite common, with 9.2% of all patents involved in a race of some kind. We also show that these races happen most often in certain types of technology (computers, networking, communications), and less often in others (biotechnology, mechanical), and theorize why this might be true. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we then look for the causal effect of winning a patent race. Not surprisingly, we find robust evidence that the firms that win the patent race are less likely to abandon their patent applications, more likely to get broad patent scope, and more likely to keep their patents in force by paying the maintenance fees. We also find evidence that these firms do more follow-on innovation in that area of technology that they win the patent race in, but, surprisingly, less overall.
NOMINEES FOR THE 2016 STEVEN KLEPPER AWARD FOR BEST YOUNG SCHOLAR PAPER
Bernadette Baumstark: ”Barriers in Profiting from Inbound Open Innovation: A Contingency Approach of Organizational Design”
ABSTRACT: This article analyzes as to how organizational design impacts firms' innovation success in integrating knowledge that they have obtained from external partners. Responding to the call for more quantitative empirical analyses on limits and boundary conditions of inbound open innovation, I provide findings of a study of 97 firms with multi-informants from the Western-European automotive industry. Based on multiple hierarchical regression analyses with robust standard errors and the behavioral theory of the firm, the study shows that organizational design (in particular formalization, specialization, communication/connectedness, (non-) monetary rewards) acts as barrier (with respect to integrating external knowledge) for firms who strive to profit from inbound open innovation.
Allard van Mossel: “The evolutionary roots of adaptive capacity: How the past quirks of an organization’s environment influence its future latitude”
ABSTRACT: Contemporary research often assumes that organizations are capable of balancing the short-term benefits flowing from efficiency against the long-term benefits flowing from adaptive capacity. However, immediate competitive pressures may lead organizations to prioritize efficiency over adaptive capacity. Under these conditions, organizational survival becomes driven by environmental selection rather than adaptation. Yet much remains unclear about whether—and if so, when—the interplay between efficiency-focused adaptation and environmental selection can lead organizations to retain significant adaptive capacity. We engage this issue with an evolutionary version of Kauffman’s NK-model and identify how and when organizations evolve to exhibit adaptive capacity and explore how this varies across patterns of environmental dynamics. Our results show that, somewhat paradoxically, environmental selection can indeed act as an enabler of future adaptation. We further show that environmental dynamism during an industry’s evolution leads to significant heterogeneity in the adaptive capacity of its organizations. Most notably, the longer an organization manages to survive in a dynamic environment (as indicated by the organization’s age), the higher its adaptive capacity is likely to be. This suggests that efficiency and adaptive capacity are not mutually exclusive—or the trade-off that they are sometimes made out to be.
Jan-Bart Vervenne and Bart Van Looy: “Small business and economic growth: does involvement in technology make a difference? An assessment on the level of European countries”
ABSTRACT: By the end of the past century, the endogenization of knowledge capital in macroeconomic performance models has become widely accepted. More recent research advanced entrepreneurship capital as one of the final pieces explaining the residual that remains.. The current paper aims at contributing to this research gap. Relying on an 11 year panel of post-millennial observations for 23 European countries, we find that the nature of the firm size distribution funnelling general economic and innovative activities matters for national productivity. Peripheral European manufacturing industries thrive on static efficiency gains of more smallness, whereas for core European knowledge economies, dynamic effects seem to prevail. The latter finding fits Baumol’s (2004) assignment of different roles to small and large firms in innovation systems. At the same time, our findings suggest that the impact of small firms depends on of the presence (or absence) of large R&D intensive firms.
NOMINEES FOR THE 2016 INDUSTRY AND INNOVATION DRUID AWARD FOR BEST PAPER
Neil Lee & Andrés Rodríguez-Pose: “Innovation in Creative Cities: Evidence from British Small Firms”
ABSTRACT: Creative cities are seen as important sites for the generation of new ideas, products and processes. Yet, beyond case studies of a few high-profile cities, there is little empirical evidence on the link between local creative industries concentration and innovation. This paper addresses this gap with an analysis of around 1,300 UK small- and medium-sized enterprises. The results suggest that firms in local economies with high shares of creative industries employment are significantly more likely to introduce entirely new products and processes than firms elsewhere, but not innovations which are simply new to the firm. This effect is not exclusive to creative industries firms and seems to be largely due to firms in medium-sized, rather than large, cities. The results imply that creative cities may have functional specialisations in new content creation and so firms are more innovative in them.
José Guimón & Juan Carlos Salazar-Elena: “Collaboration in Innovation Between Foreign Subsidiaries and Local Universities: Evidence from Spain”
ABSTRACT: Collaboration between foreign subsidiaries and universities is relevant for multinational companies (MNCs) that aim at absorbing knowledge from abroad, as well as for universities and policy-makers attempting to maximize the spillovers associated with foreign direct investment (FDI). In this paper, we explore how MNCs collaborate with universities in the foreign countries where they locate and provide new empirical evidence for Spain as a host country. Using a probit model with panel data comprising 9,614 firms for the period 2005–2011, we explore differences between the propensity to collaborate with universities of foreign subsidiaries and Spanish firms. Subsequently, building on a new survey to 89 foreign subsidiaries and on a more detailed analysis of five case studies, we discuss the variety of motivations that drive collaboration with universities and relate the scale and scope of such collaborations with the dynamic mandates of foreign subsidiaries in global innovation networks.
Hans Lööf & Börje Johansson: “R&D Strategy, Metropolitan Externalities and Productivity: Evidence from Sweden”
ABSTRACT: This paper studies the infuence of metropolitan externalitieson productivity for different types of long-run R&D engagement based on information from the Community Innovation Survey. We apply a dynamic general method of moments model to a panel of manufacturing and service firms with differentlocations in Sweden, classifed as a metropolitan region, the largest metropolitan region, a metropolitan city, the largest metropolitan city and a nonmetropolitan area. This analysis generates three distinctresults. First, the productivity premium associated with persistent R&D is close to 8 per cent in nonmetro locations and about 14 per cent in the largest city. Second, a firm without any R&D engagementdoes not benefit at all from the external milieu in metro areas. Third, no productivity premium is associated with occasional R&D effort regardless of the firm’s location.
