Fostering novelty while reducing failure: Balancing the twin challenges of product innovation
This paper aims to further our understanding of how the degrees of innovation novelty and innovation failure are connected. It argues that a better understanding of the specific predictors of innovation novelty and failure would improve our understanding of the innovation process and inform R&D managerial interventions to reduce the occurrences of failure and enhance radical innovation. This investigation draws on data on 5387 Spanish manufacturing firms from the 2009 Spanish Community Innovation Survey (CIS). Unlike prior studies which examine product innovation, degree of innovation novelty, and innovation failures in separate models, this study relies on a multivariate model to account f…
“To Own, or not to Own?” A multilevel analysis of intellectual property right policies' on academic entrepreneurship
The political environment around universities has led them to create an infrastructure to manage academic inventions. While some consider that the advantages of a university entrepreneurial structure outweigh any potential negative effects, others question their detrimental effect on academic scientists’ entrepreneurial behavior. However, this debate remains unresolved as none of these two views have been fully empirically supported. Using multilevel models for a population of 2230 professors in 27 universities in Canada (82 individuals per unit on average), we test the effect of three features of institutional intellectual property right policy characteristics, namely, property rights (own…
Overcoming the “lost before translation” problem: An exploratory study
This paper draws on Stokes’ (1997) framework to position the disconnection between theory and practice as a knowledge production problem. In this sense, we argue that a better understanding of different academic profiles is extremely important to focus efforts on those academics that may overcome the ‘lost before translation’ problem. Our data, that come from a survey of researchers affiliated to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), provide a good opportunity to explore the factors that might increase or impede the likelihood that researchers engage in research that reconciles the quest for fundamental understanding with the consideration of use (Pasteur’s profile), rather than in …