International audienceAmid increasing interest in firm age and its effects on firm performance, this special issue offers an exhaustive review of the literature and a novel collection of evidence on the effects of firm age on performance, including a special focus of interest on innovation performance, financial performance, exports, survival and growth. This editorial positions the theme in the extant literature, and provides key definitions and challenges ahead in the field of evolutionary economics. It introduces the collection of articles composing the special issue. The papers offer a diversity of country contexts, as well as analytical approaches and methods. They include an exhaustive review of the literature on age and firms’ performance, and present original empirical studies focusing on the effects of age on firms’ economic outcomes on the one hand, and on innovation outcomes on the other hand. While most of the papers use econometric analysis, the level of analysis ranges from firm to individual

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ABSTRACT.This paper analyzes the contribution of high-growth firms to the process of knowledge creation. We articulate a demand-pull innovation framework in which knowledge creation is driven by sales growth, and knowledge stems from creative recombination. Given the established literature on high growth firms and economic growth, we wonder whether gazelles follow patterns of knowledge creation mostly dominated by exploration or exploitation strategies. To this purpose, we derive indicators able to describe the structure of knowledge and qualify firms' innovation strategies. The empirical results suggest that the reality is richer than the interpretative frameworks. Increasing growth rates are indeed associated to exploration strategies, supporting the idea that high growth firms are key actors in the creation of new technological knowledge. But in the meantime, firms showing growth rates significantly higher than the average are able to command the exploration strategies by constraining them within the boundaries of familiar technological competences, suggesting that the exploration process is less random than anticipated. We end up with the result that high growth firms, and especially gazelles, follow predominantly an exploration strategy, but with the characteristics of an organized search which is often more observed in an exploitation strategy.

ABSTRACT. This paper applies the methodological tools typical of social network analysis (SNA) within an evolutionary framework, to investigate the knowledge base dynamics of the biotechnology sector. Knowledge is here considered a collective good represented as a co-relational and a retrieval-interpretative structure. The internal structure of knowledge is described as a network the nodes of which are small units within traces of knowledge, such as patent documents, connected by links determined by their joint utilisation. We used measures referring to the network, like density, and to its nodes, like degree, closeness and betweenness centrality, to provide a synthetic description of the structure of the knowledge base and of its evolution over time. Eventually, we compared such measures with more established properties of the knowledge base calculated on the basis of co-occurrences of technological classes within patent documents. Empirical results show the existence of interesting and meaningful relationships across the different measures, providing support for the use of SNA to study the evolution of the knowledge bases of industrial sectors and their lifecycles. JEL Classification Codes: O33

The economics of recombinant knowledge is a promising field of investigation. New technological systems emerge when strong cores of complementary knowledge consolidate and feed an array of coherent applications and implementations. However, diminishing returns to recombination eventually emerge, and the rates of growth of technological systems gradually decline. Empirical evidence based on analysis of the co-occurrence of technological classes within two or more patent applications, allows the identification and measurement of the dynamics of knowledge recombination. Our analysis focus on patent applications to the European Patent Office, in the period 1981-2003, and provides empirical evidence on the emergence of the new technological system based upon information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their wide scope of applications as the result of a process of knowledge recombination. The empirical investigation confirms that the recombination process has been more effective in countries characterized by higher levels of coherence and specialization of their knowledge space. Countries better able to master the recombinant generation of new technological knowledge have experienced higher rates of increase of national multifactor productivity growth.

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International audienceThe paper analyzes the effects of the properties of firms' knowledge base on the survival likelihood of firms. Drawing upon the analysis of the patterns of co-occurrence of technological classes in patent applications, we derive the coherence, variety and cognitive distance indexes, accounting respectively for technological complementarity, differentiation and dissimilarity in the firms' patent portfolios. The results of our analysis are in line with the previous literature, showing that innovation enhances the survival likelihood of firms. In addition, we show that the search strategies at work in the development of firms' knowledge base matter in reducing the likelihood of a failure event. Knowledge coherence and variety appear to be positively related to firms' survival, while cognitive distance exerts a negative effect. We conclude that firms able to exploit the accumulated technological competences have more chances to be successful in competing durably in the market arena, and derive some policy implications concerning the role of public intervention in the orientation of search efforts in local contexts