The objective of this paper is to explain how emerging organizational fields influence entrepreneurial agency and, conversely, how such agency shapes emerging fields during upswing, downturn and stabilization periods. Adopting a discursive perspective, we explicate how shared symbols provide entrepreneurs resources to formulate and legitimize heterogeneous visions during upswing periods.  read more »

This paper estimates the total cost of patent litigation. We use a large sample of stock market event studies around the date of lawsuit filings for US public firms from 1984-99. Even though most lawsuits settle, we find that the total costs of lawsuits are large compared to estimated legal fees, estimates of patent value, and R&D spending.  read more »

Open source software is a major social and economic phenomenon that raises important questions about incentives and motivations in information systems development. For example, some software developers are unpaid volunteers who seek to solve their own technical problems, while others create open source software as part of their employment contract.  read more »

In open innovation processes, and notably in the commercial development of open source software, firms increasingly make some of their intellectual property freely and publicly available. This paper extends existing research on this topic by taking a dynamic perspective.  read more »

This paper proposes a unified conceptual framework to analyse the multiple role and consequences of patents in the case of biotechnology research tools. We argue that the knowledge/information and independent/complementary nature of research tools define heterogeneous frameworks in which the patent system plays different roles.  read more »

This paper explores the process of innovation within a virtual community of open source developers. We analyse a subgroup of the hacker community called the free and open source community as they possess unique structural and processual characteristics conducive to innovative product development.  read more »

Academic researchers regard themselves as members of a self-governed community. Scientists set goals, conduct research, publish findings and evaluate results according to community standards. In recent times, there have been growing concerns that decisions in science are influenced by outside interests that may not be aligned with the scientific endeavor.  read more »

The issue of innovation processes taking place in the software sector is currently widely debated. Challenging questions arise about what products/services have to be considered innovative, and whether a specific artefact is innovative or not.  read more »

Our study inquires whether the performance of software companies that have adopted a business model based on the supply of OSS significantly differs from the performance of firms that provide only proprietary software applications.  read more »

In this paper we present a theoretical model to study the characteristics and the commercial sustainability of a particular open source strategy known as dual licensing. We show that the decision to employ a dual licensing strategy occurs whenever the the strength and the relevance of the contribution of the OS community is su±ciently large.  read more »

For over five hundred years, intellectual property has been an integral part of public policy and economic development.  read more »

This paper uses a novel data set of the trade mark activity of UK manufacturing and service sector firms to investigate whether applications for trade marks are suggestive of product innovation, improving the profitability and productivity of firms.  read more »

During the 1980s and 1990s, important legislative, judicial, and diplomatic initiatives emanated from the United States, strengthening patent and copyright enforcement systems both domestically and in the broader world economy.  read more »