The paper “Gender, management education and the willingness for academic entrepreneurship” [see a draft] by Bernd Ebersberger and Christine Pirhofer (both MCI) is accepted for publication with the Applied Economics Letters.
The paper explores the determinants of academic entrepreneurship. In particular it investigates the effects of gender and supplementary management education on academics’ willingness to start up a company. The analysis is based on a survey of academics. Controlling for academic achievement, field of science and perceived hampering factors we find that female academics show a significantly lower propensity to have a high willingness to start up. Our results indicate that supplementary management education does not in general have a significant effect on the willingness to start up. Yet, for female academics supplementary management education exerts a significantly positive effect almost offsetting the gender effect.
In collaboration with the Center for Academic Spin-Offs Tyrol (CAST) and the Management Center Innsbruck (MCI) we are organizing a two day workshop about Open Innovation. The overall aim of the workshop is to increase the use of open innovation practices by SMEs. The content of the workshop ranges from customer integration, lead user methodology, using social media and communities, management of IPR and external technology utilization.
The “National innovation policy and global open innovation: exploring balances, tradeoffs and complementarities” by Sverre Herstad, Carter Bloch, Bernd Ebersberger and Els Van de Velde is recently published in Science and Public Policy. The aim of this paper is to suggest a framework for examining the way national policy mixes are responding to the challenges and opportunities of globally distributed knowledge networks, cross- sectoral technology flows and consequently open innovation processes occurring on an international scale. We argue that the purpose of public research and innovation policy remains one of developing and sustaining territorial knowledge bases capable of growing and supporting internationally competitive industries. But the rules of the game have changed. Public policy now needs to carefully balance between: a) promoting the formation of international linkages for knowledge sourcing and information exposure; b) providing incentives for domestic industry intramural R&D for building absorptive capacity and knowledge accumulation; and c) sustaining domestic networking to allow accumulated knowledge to diffuse and recombine.
The paper “Technological specialization and variety in regional innovation systems: a view on Austrian regions” [a preprint] by Bernd Ebersberger and Florian M. Becke is now published in “Innovation in Complex Social Systems” edited by Petra Ahrweiler.
In this edited volume Petra Ahrweiler ties together a diverse set approaches to illustrate a ‘hard science’ approach to innovation. Natural scientists, computer scientists, mathematicians and social scientists contribute to illustrate cutting-edge methodology in the analysis of innovation complex social systems. The paper “Technological specialization and variety in regional innovation systems” illustrates how patent information can be used to investigate regional patern of technological specialization and their inter-temporal dynamics.
The paper “The devil dwells in the tails” by Toke Reichstein, Michael Dahl, Bernd Ebersberger and Morten Jensen is now published in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics.
This paper explores firm growth rate distribution in a Gibrat’s Law context. It is novel in two respects. First, rather than limiting the analysis to a focus on the conditional mean, we investigate the entire shape of the distribution. Second, we show that differences in the firm growth rate process between large and small firms are highly circumstantial and depend on the industry dynamics. The data used include more than 9,000 Danish manufacturing, services and construction firms. We provide robust evidence indicating that firm growth studies should concentrate less on explaining means and instead focus on other parts of the firm growth rate distribution.
The new working paper MNCs Between the Local and the Global: Knowledge Bases, Proximity and Distributed Knowledge Networks by Björn Asheim, Bernd Ebersberger and Sverre Herstad is available as a draft.
The strategies and decisions of MNCs of how to organize their innovation work, and where to locate their R&D facilities are contingent upon a number of different structural properties connected to the companies, their products and productions, institutional frameworks and local embeddedness. One important characteristic of companies is the dominant knowledge base(s) of their activity, which determine the need for proximity to collaboration partners and presence in specific territorial environments. Another important characteristic is the institutional and relational proximity between subsidiaries and MNC HQs. This paper discusses these structural properties against the background of existing research, and proceeds to conduct a two-step empirical analysis using Norwegian community Innovation survey data. First, it investigates the relationship between knowledge bases, forms of MNC affiliation and the geographical scope of the external collaborative network maintained internationally by Norwegian enterprises. This reveals that the analytical knowledge base and MNC affiliation both increase this scope. Second, it investigates the extent to which parent MNC subsidiary presence in a specific world region impact on the diversity of collaborative relationships maintained in the same region. For synthetic knowledge based enterprises, the presence of a daughter subsidiary in a given world region has a strong, positive impact on external collaboration in the same region. These findings are consistent with the notion that the synthetic knowledge base is subjected to stronger forces of co-localization and embeddedness than the analytical knowledge base.
Jointly with the Center for Academic Spin-Offs Tyrol (CAST) we organize a workshop about idea generation and idea evaluation for the Tiroler Zukunftsstiftung. Target audience are innovation managers and interested employees of companies associated with the Tyrolean Cluster Initiative.
Content of the workshop is the idea generation and idea evaluation in the early phase of the innovation process, introducing some of the common creativity techniques as well as internet based versions of brainstorming (www.brainr.de). Using an artificial case participants explore their own creativity and generate ideas to develop product ideas for the given case company. The ideas generated in the creativity session are evaluated in the evaluation session after introducing a set of methods for idea evaluation.
The final draft of “Determinants of academic entrepreneurship” is finalized and available for download.
This paper explores the determinants of academic entrepreneurship. In particular it investigates the effects of gender and supplementary management education on academics’ willingness to start up a company. As a data source the analysis relies on a survey of academics in Tyrolean universities. Controlling for academic achievement, field of science and perceived hampering factors we find that female academics show a significantly lower propensity to have a high willingness to start up. Overall supplementary management education does not have a significant effect on the willingness to start up. Yet, for female academics supplementary management education exerts a significantly positive effect almost offsetting the gender effect.
This result resonates the findings that reduced rates of female entrepreneurship can be attributed to lower female entrepreneurial control beliefs (Goethner et al. 2009) and that management education increases self efficacy with female students more than it does with their fellow males (Wilson, Kickul & Marlino 2007).
References.
Goethner, M., Obschonka, M., Silbereisen, R. K., & Cantner, U. (2009). Approaching the Agora – Determinants of Scientists’ Intentions to Pursue Academic Entrepreneurship. Jena Economic Research Papers. Jena.
Wilson, F., Kickul, J., & Marlino, D. (2007). Gender, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial career intentions: Implications for entrepreneurship education. Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 31(3), 387-406.
The paper ‘Into thin air – Using a quantile regression approach to explore the relationship between R&D and innovation‘ by Bernd Ebersberger, Orietta Marsili, Toke Reichstein and Ammon Salter, forthcoming in the International Journal of Applied Economics, is available online.
We apply quantile regression to 760 Finnish firms and show that the relationship between R&D and firm performance is less straight forward than so far assumed. OLS regression analysis fails to capture the effect of R&D expenditure at different locations on the performance distribution. We reveal that R&D matters, especially on the medium quantiles, while regressing against the upper quantiles of the economic gains from innovation distribution exhibit decreasing returns scale in R&D. Our results confirm that Gaussian statistics fail to capture the most interesting part of the distribution – namely the extreme observations located in the tails.
Unfortunately the original pdf-file currently available online contained an illegible table and a rather fuzzy print of the diagrams.
In an updated version the publisher took care about this. The paper is now perfectly legible.
On January 24 and Janurary 25 I had the honor and the pleasure to participate in the Innovation Excellence Network Meeting hosted and initiated by Hannes Erler (VP Innovation of Swarovski). Participating innovation managers and professionals came from Bombardier, Deutsche Post, Deutsch Bahn, Daimler, Schott, Osram, Siemens, Henkel just to name a few. The meeting was facilitated by inno-focus. Most recently a Xing Group has been set up to foster the interaction of Network members. The overall meeting ran under the headline of ‘Innovation 2.0 – Processes, Structures, Virtualization’. For all participants the meeting offered intensive and inspiring discussions about new ways to organize the innovation process, to optimize structures for fostering successful innovation and the potential of open and cross innovation.
In an introductory presentation I talked about Open Innovation and some new findings which originate from Sverre Herstad’s and my work. I also talked about that the findings mean that internal capabilities and resources allocated to R&D are important determinantes of innovation success. R&D cannot be (fully) subsituted by open innovation activities. This led to the last part of the presentation introducing social network analysis to the audience as a means to get a better – and different – view on the structure of interaction within the companies. The implications for the innovation process were discussed in the subsequent Q&A session.
The presentation was held in German, hence the slides are also in German titled ‘Die Öffnung des Innovationsprozesses‘.
