Present Projects


Innovating for competitive advantage and productivity
Bruno Cassiman, Rodolfo Campos, Núria Mas, Flavia Roldán, Carles Vergara-Alert, Govert Vroom
Sponsored by Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología

Innovation has been hailed as the solution for firms and economies that are struggling. However, the connection between innovation and competitive advantage at the firm level or innovation and productivity at the economy wide level is not well understood. The objective of this project is to study this relation between innovation and “success” both at the micro level of organizing for innovation and the macro level as a driver of productivity growth more in depth.



Past Projects


Appropriating Value Created by Technological Innovation
Tunji Adegbasan

Advances in technology have had a tremendous impact on the economy. This project looks at the appropriation of value created by technological innovation. Applying cooperative game theory and the recent bargaining perspective on resource advantage (Lippman & Rumelt, 2003), the papers investigate the determinants of the distribution of value created by a technological innovation, among the members of the coalition that contribute to its creation.

Dynamics of Firm Organization and Performance
Bruno Cassiman, Núria Mas, Antonio Davila and Fabrizio Ferraro

What defines successful firms? The objective of this project is twofold. Firstly, we propose to highlight several aspects of the dynamics of firm organization that contribute to our understanding of firm behaviour and firm performance. Secondly, these insights will provide a broader and multidisciplinary approach to the subject. The project is organized around four concurrent lines of research: Changes in Corporate Governanceevolution of Management, Control Systems, Changes in Firm Boundaries and Changes in Workforce Composition. This research has a rough length of three years and has the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, through the National Plan of R& D&I (Research, Development and Innovation).

Innovation and Productivity
Bruno Cassiman

These research line studies the relationship between innovation and productivity. Tt is analized how firm decisions affect performance and survival. It is also studied the relationship between innovation activity, productivity and exports. Finally, the authors try to empirically assess how technology flows are structured in international firms, using Belgian company data from the Eurostat Community Innovation Survey.

These project will be three outputs:
• Product Innovation and Exports: Evidence from Spanish Manufacturing
with Ester Martínez-Ros (Universidad Carlos III)

• Innovation and the export-productivity link
with Elena Golovko (IESE Business School, PhD)

• Multinational Embeddedness and Innovation Performance
with Reinhilde Veugelers (KU Leuven)

The Organization of Innovation
Bruno Cassiman

This project analyzes, from different points of view, how market and companies develop their innovation processes.

The outputs which will be published:
• Organizing R&D for Exploration and Exploitation
with Giovanni Valentini (Bocconi University)

• Are External Technology Acquisition Strategies Substitutes or Complements: The Case of Embodied and Disembodied Technology Acquisition?
with Reinhilde Veugelers (KU Leuven)

• “Why do Firms Spawn? An Analysis of the Medical Device Industry, August 2006
with Aaron Chatterji (Duke, Fuqua Business School) and Masako Ueda (University of Madison, School of Business).

• The Organization of R&D and Innovation Type
with Pedro Mendi (Universidad de Navarra)

• Complementarity in the Innovation Strategy

From Science to Economic Performance at the Firm level
Bruno Cassiman

The project evaluates the contribution of science linkages to the innovation performance of a firm at the patent level, using patent data from the European Patent Office combined with firm level data. In addition, it examines the diversity of linkages of firms to science and their effect on innovation performance for a sample of Belgian firms (CIS-3).
 
These will be the results of this project:
• In Search of Performance Effects of (in) direct Industry Science Links
with Reinhilde Veugelers (KU Leuven) and Pluvia Zuniga (OECD)

• Science Linkages and Innovation Performance: An Analysis on CIS-3 firms in Belgium
with Reinhilde Veugelers (KU Leuven) and Pluvia Zuniga (OECD) (Target: Book Chapter)

• Validation of Industry-Science Links Indicators
with Funda Sezgi (IESE Business School, PhD)

Peer-to-Peer Filesharing and the Market for Digital Information Goods
Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Andres Hervas-Drane

The project studies competitive interaction between two alternative models of digital content distribution over the Internet: peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing and centralized client-server distribution. It presents microfoundations for a stylized model of p2p file sharing where all peers are endowed with standard preferences and show that the endogenous structure of the network is conducive to sharing by a significant number of peers, even if sharing is costlier than freeriding.

Open vs. Integrated Innovation: A Model of Discovery and Confinement
Ramon Casadesus-Masanell

¿Cuándo son los procesos de innovacion abiertos superiores a los procesos integrados? El modelo desarrollado, muestra empresas que o bien controlan todos los aspectos del proceso de innovación de producto (innovación integrada) o bien dejan abiertos sus diseños a terceros que desarrollan sus componentes (innovación abierta). El documento quiere demostrar que la eficacia de cada alternativa depende de la complejidad del panorama competitivo en el que se mueve la empresa.