Nicoletta Corrocher

Università commerciale Luigi Bocconi | Bocconi · Center for Research in Innovation, Organization and Strategy

This paper studies the relationship between founding team knowledge diversity and firms’ innovative performance. We posit that knowledge diversity entails two dimensions: a team dimension and an individual dimension. In particular, we argue that founding team knowledge diversity can derive both from the presence of founders with different knowledge...

The use of mobile phones offers unique opportunities for information exchange and service provision within healthcare. Yet mHealth has historically been dominated by small scale, isolated initiatives. The main obstacle to scaling up mHealth projects is a lack of evidence on their performance, preventing the projects from receiving additional fundin...

This paper investigates the intensity of international collaborations in energy-related technologies across OECD and BRIICS countries, by disentangling the role of the distance in environmental policy stringency between countries, controlling for the more traditional measures of technological, social, institutional and geographical distance. In doi...

This paper analyzes firms' strategies that aim at retaining customers and examines consumers' characteristics that make them ideal targets for companies’ loyalty programs. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop a formal economic model to study the incentives of firms to offer personalized pricing pla...

The paper investigates the existence of a natural resource curse, from a within-country perspective. This perspective tends to be overlooked in the existing literature, which provides extensive country-level analyses of the issue. In particular, the paper examines the relationship between agriculture and mining and quarrying resources endowments an...

We study the determinants of firms’ exit from product segments in a technologically dynamic industry to understand whether exit depends on entry timing, the pre-entry experience of entrants, and the presence of a dominant firm in the segment. Relying upon a detailed database of products from the digital audio player industry since its inception, we...

Financial constraints have an important impact on the development of eco-innovations but their effect varies according to the type of funding. This article studies the interaction between public funding on the one hand, and internal and external lack of funding on the other. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of European small- and medium-...

This paper investigates whether and how diversified firms in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector innovate in green technologies and assess the potential impact of these innovations on firm performance. The analysis relies on a balanced panel dataset of European ICT firms in the period 2009–2013. The results suggest an inverted...

Traditional choice models perform poorly in understanding the determinants of the adoption of new products. First, data on pioneers and early adopters are biased towards specific performance characteristics of the product and the socio-demographic characteristics of the consumers. Second, surveys on the intention to buy underperform in detecting mo...

We empirically study the factors affecting the timing of adoption of a consumer technology. We account for four possible effects (epidemic, probit, stock, and order effect) in relation to the diffusion of portable digital audio players (DAPs) using an original dataset of several hundred potential adopters from eight European countries and Japan. Ou...

The transformation of waste into a valuable resource is a key process towards sustainable development and green growth and therefore represents a major concern for policy-makers. Technological innovation plays a crucial role in waste management and therefore understanding the way in which regulation may spur innovation in this domain constitute is...

Where do innovative products come from? Why do some firms address new market niches and others do not? The literature has rarely blended the concept of innovativeness of a product at the market level with the coherence of the product portfolio at the firm level. In this paper, we examine whether the introduction of products that are highly innovati...

The cohesion across European member states and regions has been constantly promoted by EU science policy. Research networks and collaborations have for long constituted one of the most important vehicles of EU research integration. The presence of EU research funding can influence the collaborative behaviour among member states and, potentially, th...

The article presents an overview of the evolutionary approach to eco-innovations with particular emphasis on the role of lock-in and path-dependence. In doing so, it focuses on the processes of radical change and transition of technological systems, which require the co-evolution of technology, firms, institutions and the society as a whole. Starti...

We study the survival chances of new product innovators in technologically dynamic industries to understand whether they differ depending on the timing of entry and pre-entry experience. Relying upon a detailed database of products from the Digital Audio Player industry since its inception, we find that de-novo product innovators experience a relat...

The mobile phone industry is a very innovative segment within the ICT sector and the smartphone is becoming the standard configuration among the different types of mobile devices. Technical change and new product proliferation have made this industry extremely dynamic, even if market shares are highly concentrated in the hands of very few companies...

Corrocher N. and Cusmano L. The ‘KIBS engine’ of regional innovation systems: empirical evidence from European regions, Regional Studies. Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) are key players in innovation systems, particularly in advanced regions where manufacturing competitiveness largely depends on knowledge contents provided by highly sp...

The cohesion across European member states and regions has been constantly promoted by EU science policy particularly through the Framework Programme. The paper investigates the intensity of bilateral collaborations between EU regions (at the NUTS 2 level) in ICT-related projects. Results show that the geographical distance reduces the strength of...

This paper studies the growth patterns in knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) in Lombardy on the basis of original firm-level survey data. The aim is to investigate in particular the role of and interplay between age and size of firms and the modes of innovation in the process of growth. Our findings indicate that younger firms tend to out...

The paper investigates the role of standard organizations as engines of innovation examining the emergence and evolution of the short message service (sms). The empirical analysis elaborates the information collected from a series of interviews carried out with members of the standard committees in charge of non-voice services in the global system...

Despite a considerable amount of theoretical and empirical research in industrial organisation literature on the relationship between piracy, music sales and their antecedents, a significant gap exists for what concerns the linkage between digital music piracy and the recent success of online music stores (OMS). Our aim is to investigate the motiva...

Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) are the emergent players in the debate about innovation systems, knowledge-driven economic dynamics and competitiveness (Muller and Zenker, 2001; Miles, 2005a; Muller and Doloreux, 2007). A burgeoning literature stresses their role as co-producers of innovation and source of added value for regional syst...

The article studies the intensity of usage of VoIP, analysing individual data on a sample of UK consumers collected by OFCOM in 2006. In particular, it examines the role of firms' strategies in affecting the intensity of usage and the degree of substitution/complementarity between VoIP and other communications means. It investigates the importance...

The paper investigates the factors associated with the intensity of use of three Web 2.0 services – video sharing, social networking and social bookmarking – by looking at the users' characteristics and at the technological features. It relies upon a theoretical framework that combines the diffusion of innovation model with the technology acceptanc...

In a duopoly with price discrimination and switching costs, we analyse the evolution of market structure, when an incumbent and a new entrant compete, and a new class of users with lower willingness to pay appears in the market. We find that the market share of the new entrant depends on the degree of heterogeneity and the level of switching costs....

This paper aims to analyse the pricing strategies of mobile communications operators and examine the role of demand characteristics in the development of new tariff plans. In so doing, we depart from a traditional industrial organization approach to price discrimination and interpret new tariff plans as innovations. In the spirit of Schumpeter, we...

The essays in this volume probe the impact the digital revolution has had, or sometimes failed to have, on global business. Has digital technology, the authors ask, led to structural changes and greater efficiency and innovation? While most of the essays support the idea that the information age has increased productivity in global business, the ev...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

This paper investigates the importance that consumers assign to local network effects, i.e. the extent to which they take account of their contacts’ mobile operators when choosing a provider for themselves. The authors identify individual characteristics that affect the importance consumers attach to local network effects. The study relies on a sur...

The present paper investigates the sectoral variety and common patterns across different typologies of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). We examine this issue by considering the case of Lombardy, a highly developed manufacturing area the industrial activities of which are experiencing a pervasive transformation towards higher knowledge...

The generation of new varieties is crucial for economic growth. The capitalistic mode of production has shown over time a remarkable capability of setting incentives for economic actors to create new products and processes. Concerning the development of new products, the incentives lie in the possibility to gain market power either by offering good...

This chapter aims at investigating the evolution of the digital divide within a set of developing countries between the years 2000 and 2005. In doing so, it moves away from the traditional analysis of the digital divide, which compares developed countries and developing countries, and examines the existing gap within a relatively homogeneous group...

Research networks foster the dissemination of innovation-related knowledge. To address this conjecture, we evaluate the structure of collaborative networks and of knowledge transfer between research, innovation and deployment activities in the field of information and communication technology for the European Union as a whole and for several Europe...

This paper concentrates on the role of research network infrastructure in fostering the dissemination of innovation-related knowledge. It examines the structure of collaborative networks and of knowledge transfer between research, innovation and deployment activities in the field of information and communication technology for the European Union as...

We consider a sample of IT managers in SMEs in Italy and investigate what influences their evaluation of the objectives of, the obstacles to and the drivers of ICT adoption. Our results show that adoption decisions are highly path-dependent, as managers’ perceptions of the benefits of technologies significantly depend on previously adopted technolo...

We provide evidence on the influence of expectations and network effects on the timing of technological adoption. By considering a sample of SMEs operating in Italy we focus on the determinants of their decision to adopt Fast Ethernet, a communication standard for Local Area Networks (LANs). We find that both expectations and network effects signif...

In this paper we analyse the determinants of adoption of new technologies for local area networks (LAN). By considering a sample of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in Italy, we focus in particular on the determinants of their decision to adopt Fast Ethernet. The empirical evidence shows that both expectations and network effects signi...

This paper studies the patterns of innovation in the ICT field using patents and patent citations. It provides an original methodology to identify ICT applications using patent abstracts and selecting the most frequent sequential triples of words without any a priori selection of keywords. This paper shows that the set of IPC classes related to ICT...

This paper examines the determinants of adoption of Internet banking among Italian retail banks. In particular it aims at investigating the nature of Internet banking in relation to traditional banking activity. In doing so, the paper analyses the role of firm-specific and market-specific characteristics in affecting the decision to provide financi...

The broadband plans deployed by governments have not benefited so far from substantive theoretical or empirical economic insights on the relative effectiveness of alternative combinations of policy interventions (on which more will be said in the next section). This paper make a first attempt at filling this gap by exploring whether some (set of) p...

Organisational change in the retail banking industry is particularly relevant in a country characterised by the prevalence of small banks and where the number of branches has increased over time, notwithstanding the potential for network rationalisation offered by information and communication technology. This paper examines the impact of technolog...

We begin with an overview of innovation in services using two existing data-sets. In Chapter 2 we compare the extent and orientation of innovation in services and manufacturers across Europe using the Innobarometer survey. In Chapter 3 we draw on the second European Community Innovation Survey (CIS-2) and look primarily at patterns of innovation wi...

This paper examines the emergence of technologies, applications and platforms in the area of information and communication technologies (ITC), using patent data. It detects new technologies/applications/products using patents' abstracts and describes them looking at their degree of "hybridisation", in terms of technological domains and knowledge ba...

This paper selects endogenously 149 relevant technologies or plaff’orms in the ICT field through a browsing procedure of patents abstract. Innovative products and applications in emerging and non emerging technologies are compared. This paper shows that emerging technologies are more concentrated across countries, firms and technological IPC classe...

This paper analyses the current demand and market potential for Internet telephony—the transmission of voice over the public Internet or over a private Intranet—a technology that has attracted considerable attention as an appealing alternative to traditional telephony but that is likely to develop as a component within an integrated system of video...

Il Digital Divide: un modello di analisi dei percorsi di diffusione delle tecnologie digitali (di Nicoletta Corrocher° e Andrea Ordanini°°) - ABSTRACT: This article proposes a new model to measure the digital divide within a set of countries or geographical areas. Starting from a series of elementary indicators, the methodology groups these indicat...

The rate of technical change that is characterising both the telecommunications and the computer industry has been a major driver of the evolution of a close and stable system into an open and dynamic one. The introduction of a cluster of new technologies has originated significant changes within the telecom system and within the economy as a whole...

The paper aims at examining the drivers of the adoption of the Internet banking, in order to understand its role with respect to the traditional banking activity and to offer a comprehensive picture of the diffusion of such a technology within the sector. In doing so, it analyses the role of firm-specific and non firm-specific (technology, market,...

This article proposes a new model for measuring the digital divide within a set of countries or geographical areas. Starting from a series of elementary indicators the methodology groups these indicators into six factors of digitalization and, subsequently, aggregates the factors in a synthetic index called the synthetic index of digitalization. Th...