Various factors enable manufacturing firms to attain a competitive advantage based on service innovation-that is, to achieve service innovation performance. Starting from a dynamic capabilities perspective, this article predicts that absorptive capacity is one such critical factor, which in turn may be driven by employee collaboration and the firm's search breadth. The findings of a survey study of small to medium-sized Dutch manufacturing firms confirm that employee collaboration and search breadth have positive effects on an organization's potential absorptive capacity, whereas employee collaboration also reinforces its realized absorptive capacity. Thus realized absorptive capacity ultimately enhances service innovation performance. The results have implications for dynamic capabilities theory, and they provide practitioners with potential means to outperform their competitors in service innovation efforts.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates which business starters experience credit rationing by simultaneously analyzing which business founders apply for credit and which are refused. We argue that credit denial depends largely on the entrepreneursÕ commitment and signals regarding the repayment of the loan and the success chances of the proposed business. Our empirical analysis is based on a sample of 1140 potential business starters in the Dutch county South Limburg. Our findings show that commitments drive the credit application and approval, while the effects of signals are mixed. The findings also suggest that business founders have a pretty good idea regarding whether their applications will be honored or not.KEY WORDS: Self-employment, capital market imperfections, credit rationing.JEL CLASSIFICATIONS: G20, J23, L26.

Research on technological partnerships has traditionally sought explanation of their high failure rates in partner characteristics and relationship features. This study introduces the notion of a 'bumpy road' in technology partnerships which refers to undesired outcomes such as 'partnership mal-functioning' and 'instability' to the degree to which innovation activities are hampered. We explain how firm-level strategies can reduce the probability of a 'bumpy road' in partnerships. We also assess the impact of this 'bumpy road' on innovative performance. We find that firms that excel in diversification of external activities (in terms of different types of partners) perform best. Moreover, a persistent product oriented innovation strategy geared at developing new products, new markets, or higher product quality will yield more stable partnership outcomes. Our results confirm that engagement in partnerships is beneficial for innovative performance. However, firms that experienced a 'bumpy road' in their technological partnerships have to pay a price in terms of a negative effect on their innovative performance.

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This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. we show that the size of a firm's R&D partnership portfolio and its share of novel partners both have an inverted U-shaped effect on the inflow of technological knowledge from the firm's R&D partners. We also show how these direct effects vary as a function of the level of technological uncertainty within the portfolio. Permanent repository link3

Using a Bayesian learning model, the authors provide a formal understanding of the strategic implications of a firm's R&D alliance activity through its local or distant ties. A major advantage of the model is that it facilitates an explicit analysis of the factors that determine a firm's potential to learn from its R&D alliances. The article's theoretical approach shows how technological uncertainty, information redundancy and heterogeneity of information accuracy jointly affect the formation of inter-firm alliance ties.

We take a descriptive look at interrelated factor demand starting from the observation that adjustment of capital and labor is lumpy. We find that the adjustment dynamics of an input factor are affected by large adjustments in the other. D

Abstract:A structural model is developed and estimated by a maximum likelihood routine to investigate interrelated factor demand subject to nonconvex adjustment costs. The dataset concerns Norwegian plants operating in manufacturing industries and it covers the period 1993-2005. The estimates indicate that it is advantageous to adjust the stock of labour and capital simultaneously. The cost advantage of simultaneous changes is small for capital but is large for labour. The empirical results suggest that when estimating separate factor demand models the bias of parameter estimates is most severe in case of labour demand.JEL Codes: D92, E22, E24, J23, L60