Firm Organization, Industrial Structure, and Technological Innovation
Reprinted from Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 31 (1996), 193–224.
I am grateful for helpful comments and conversations with Glenn Carroll, Hank Chesbrough, Niel Kay, Ralph Landau, Richard Nelson, Nathan Rosenberg, Oliver Williamson, and two anonymous referees.
The formal and informal structures of firms and their external linkages have an important bearing on the rate and direction of innovation. This paper explores the properties of different types of firms with respect to the generation of new technology. Various archetypes are recognized and an effort is made to match organization structure to the type of innovation. The framework is relevant to technology and competition policy as it broadens the framework economists use to identify environments that assist innovation.
