Salvatore Torrisi

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

University–industry collaborations are an important pathway through which academic scientists engage with industry and society, co-create new knowledge, and raise funds to carry out costly research endeavors. Nonetheless, the management of such collaborations is challenging and requires universities to protect their investments in intellectual prop...

We examine how market overlap with parent organizations impacts the performance of startups founded by the former employees of these incumbent firms. Building on knowledge inheritance and competitive dynamics theories, we propose that the degree to which the operating markets of spinouts overlap with their parent organizations has a curvilinear rel...

Crowdfunding has become an established means for new ventures in search for funding and it has received increased attention from scholars and policy makers. One of the most relevant aspects of crowdfunding is to understand the factors associated with the success of a campaign. This paper addresses the issue with a novel dataset of 89 Italian campai...

This study analyzes the antecedents of technology spin-off resulting from the exploitation of patented technology developed in established firms and then transferred to a new organization. We hypothesize and empirically examine how teamwork and autonomy, two key dimensions of the established organization’s inventive activity, correlate with spin-of...

Research summary This research addresses firms’ use of external knowledge sources to develop patented inventions and explores the validity of patent citations as an indicator of inter‐firm knowledge flows. By comparing patent citations with primary data reported by the inventors, we uncover systematic measurement errors in patent citations and show...

Competitive dynamics theory suggests that rival firms imitate other competing firms with similar resources to maintain competitive parity while are likely to differentiate from the market leader to avoid its dangerous retaliation. According to neo-institutional theory, in highly uncertain environments, rivals are likely to imitate the market leader...

The software industry produces a pervasive technology with a large share of software being developed by users in different sectors. An independent software industry emerged from vertical disintegration of the computer industry and IT-intensive users such as financial organizations and telecommunications. With the diffusion of the Internet, the stra...

The software industry produces a pervasive technology with a large share of software being developed by users in different sectors. An independent software industry emerged from vertical disintegration of the computer industry and IT-intensive users such as financial organizations and telecommunications. With the diffusion of the Internet, the stra...

This paper employs data from a large-scale survey (InnoS&T) of inventors in Europe, the USA, and Japan who were listed in patent applications filed at the European Patent Office with priority years between 2003 and 2005. We provide evidence regarding the reasons for patenting and the ways in which patents are being utilized. A substantial share of...

Research on patent valuation has become increasingly important in academic and policy circles in the last few decades. In part, this is the outcome of the wide consensus that innovation is a crucial ingredient for growth at various levels. On the other hand, there has also been an overcoming of growth models unilaterally focused on technological-or...

Over the past fifty years innovations in semiconductors, data storage devices, computer architecture, software, and data communications have revolutionized information collection, storage, processing, and distribution, creating new industries and transforming industries inherited from past industrial eras. Explanations of this revolution in informa...

The increasing importance of patents for firm strategy goes beyond the protection of inventions from imitation (traditional strategy). Patenting can generate rents by blocking the commercial endeavor of rivals (proprietary strategy) or avoiding the risk of being held-up by other patent owners (defensive strategy). This paper empirically investigate...

Corporate reputation has been widely considered an important intangible asset that firms can use for improving their levels of performance. Previous works mainly focused their attention on large established firms and on the relationship between reputation and consumers’ behavior. Based on a sample of 200 UK startups operating in the micro and nanot...

We analyze patent spinoffs by looking at the organizational characteristics of the parent organization, i.e. the firm where the patented invention has occurred. We consider organizational dimensions such are the adoption of teamwork, the decisional autonomy of inventors and collaboration with external parties during the inventive process. We also a...

Questo lavoro analizza la dinamica competitiva e le strategie innovative di imprese produttrici di software e servizi informatici. I temi principali affrontati riguardano l'entrata di nuove imprese e la reazione delle imprese affermate a nuovi prodotti o modelli di business.

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...

The market for technology plays a crucial role in firms’ technology strategy as a way to undertake search in the available technological space. Drawing on innovation search theory and the literatures on licensing and absorptive capacity (AC) we address the issue of the factors that affect how technologically distant from the existing technological...

This article examines the entry into and survival in the U.S. software market by a sample of firms based in India, Ireland, and Israel, with a focus on the pre-entry technological capabilities, international linkages, and home-based experience of these firms as determinants. Using a novel measure of foreign activity, namely, the registration of sof...

This paper investigates the skills and the division of labor among participants in collective inventions. Our analysis draws on a large sample of projects registered at Sourceforge.net, the world's largest incubator of open source software activity. We test the hypothesis that skill variety of participants is associated with project performance. We...

This paper studies the emergence of entrepreneurs and their skill profile in the open source software (OSS) community. We test the hypothesis that entrepreneurs, carrying out complex, multitask activities, have more balanced skill sets compared with individuals who are less involved in project management activities.Our empirical analysis employs th...

This paper focuses on cross-licensing, a strategy which earlier studies have found to be adopted especially by holders of large patent portfolios operating in complex products industries like computers, semiconductors and electronics (Cohen, Nelson and Walsh, 2000; Grindley and Teece 1997). We analyze the association between the importance of cross...

This paper discusses methods for the harmonization and combination of large-scale patent and trademark datasets with each other and other sources of data. Dictionary- and rule-based approaches to the consolidation of applicant names in patent data are presented and shown to have both benefits and drawbacks in isolation. We combine the two methods a...

Gambardella A., Mariani M. and Torrisi S. How 'provincial' is your region? Openness and regional performance in Europe, Regional Studies. By employing 1995-2000 data on European regions, an index of regional openness is constructed based on the share of hotels in the population and the share of the population that speaks a second language. This ind...

This paper contributes to the open source software (OSS) literature by investigating the likelihood that a participant becomes a project leader. Project leaders are key actors in a virtual community and are crucial to the success of the OSS model. Knowledge of the forces that lead to the emergence of project managers among the multitude of particip...

This article examines the complementarity among information and communication technologies (ICT), skills, and organizational change from a panel of 680 Italian manufacturing firms during 1995–2003. By drawing on different statistical methods, we found evidence of complementarity between skills and organizational change, but did not find evidence of...

Novos clusters na produção internacional de software: evidência de patentes, marcas registradas e suas ligações RESUMO Este trabalho analisa o desempenho de firmas localizadas em em três economias emergentes -Índia, Irlanda e Israel. A análise empírica, baseada em uma amostra de 876 empresas, faz duas perguntas principais. Primeira, pergunta-se que...

The lack of firm-level data on innovative activities has always constrained the development of empirical studies on innovation. More recently, the availability of large datasets on indicators, such as R&D expenditures and patents, has relaxed these constrains and spurred the growth of a new wave of research. However, measuring innovation still rema...

This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the private value of patents and R&D in European firms during the period 1991-2004. We explore the relationship between firm's stock market value, patents, and "quality"-weighted patents issued by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). We find that Tobin's q i...

This chapter analyzes the role of MNCs in the development of the software industry in India, Ireland, and Israel. It shows that the evolution of software activities and the role of MNCs varied considerably across these three countries in terms of the timing of entry and the type of activities conducted by MNCs. Ireland MNCs provided the domestic in...

This paper explores the complementarity between skills, organizational change and investments in information and communication technology (ICT). Our work contributes to the literature on the effects of ICT by testing the hypothesis of complementarity in a panel of 540 Italian manufacturing firms during the period 1995-2000. Our analysis provides st...

This paper analyses entry and survival in the US software market by using a sample of 875 software and IT service firms located in three emerging economies - India, Ireland and Israel. The empirical analysis addresses the role of pre-entry technological capabilities and international alliances in affecting the firm decision to enter foreign markets...

India, Ireland and Israel have experienced a high growth in the software industry especially during the 1990s. This paper aims to analyze the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in the development of the software industry in these countries. The study is centred on software production and IT-related services - software development, chip desig...

This paper estimates the determinants of labour productivity in European NUTS regions during 1989-1996. We compare three potential explanations of regional advantages: Technological capabilities (proxied by regional patents), agglomeration economies (employment density), and openness. To study the latter we use the number of airplane passengers emb...

This paper analyzes the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in the growth of the software industry in three emerging economies - India, Ireland and Israel. The paper examines the evolution of MNCs' activities over time and their linkages with domestic software firms, by drawing on different sources of data The empirical analysis leads to two...

Acknowledgments The authors thank all the participants at two Workshops in Pittsburgh and Pisa, notably Ahish Arora, Alfonso Gambardella and Steven Klepper for their comments on earlier drafts. Antonello Zanfei, Davide Castellani, Suma Athreye, Anita Sands and Daniel Breznitz provided data and information in the research process. We also thank Elvi...

Abstract This paper is about open source software projects’ activity and the characteristics of different categories of contributors.Our empirical analysis draws on a large sample of OSS projects registered at the Sourceforge website. For each project we have information about individual contributors such as skills, roles, and tasks assigned. Key v...

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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 explores the organisation and codification of knowledge in software firms. It analyses various economic incentives to codification, including the need to improve the productivity and quality of software production and the networks of inter-firm alliances.The paper examines the experience of five Italian software firms specialising in sof...

This paper contributes empirically to our understanding of informed traders. It analyzes traders' characteristics in a foreign exchange electronic limit order market via anonymous trader identities. We use six indicators of informed trading in a cross-sectional multivariate approach to identify traders with high price impact. More information is co...

A PSpice model of punch through IGBTs based on a physics equation model is presented in this paper. A simplified way of implementing the complicated equations into the PSpice simulator is developed using a mathematical approximation. Also, a new method to elaborate the PSpice netlist is reported. The resulting PSpice model permits simulation on PCs...

This paper uses data on new subsidiaries, acquisitions, collaborative agreements, and patents of the largest 32 US and European electronics firms during 1984–1992 to examine the relationships between technological and business diversification. We find that during the 1980s many firms focused on fewer businesses, but we find no evidence of greater t...

This paper analyses the process of growth and restructuring of 38 large European and US software firms during the period 1984-1992. Since the end of the 1960s, an independent software industry has emerged in the US and in Europe stimulated by technological and institutional change. Particularly, the diffusion of small computers and local area netwo...

In 1992 the Western European market for information technologies was $157.2 billion (approximately 36 percent of the world market); in the United States it was $152.5 billion; and in Japan it was $75 billion. Software and services accounted for 41.5 percent of the total European information technologies market, against 59 percent in the United Stat...

Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips stock price has been predicted using the difference between core and headline CPI in the United States. Linear trends in the CPI difference allow accurate prediction of the prices at a five to ten-year horizon.

Technology inward licensing plays a crucial role in firm's technology strategy as a way to undertake trajectories of search in the available technological space. The links between licensing and the patterns of firms' technological diversification are still underdeveloped in the economics and management literature. The aim of our study is to explore...

This paper examines entry and survival in the US software market of a sample of firms based in India, Ireland and Israel. Our investigation focuses on pre-entry technological capabilities, international linkages and home based experience as determinants of the firm entry decision and post-entry survival. Our novel measure of foreign activity is the...

This paper estimates the effects of the 'knowledge capital' on the performance of the chemical and electronics 'Fortune 500' North American, European and Japanese firms between 1993-1997. The novelty of this paper is that, apart from the R&D and patent stocks of the firms, we measure the knowledge capital of the firms by also including a measure of...

5 OECD; and 6 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Acknowledgments: We thank, and all the participants at the PATSTAT Users' Meeting in Paris in March 2008 and seminars at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and "L. Bocconi" University in Milan for very fruitful discussions during the preparation of this paper. We also thank Armando Benin...

Acknowledgments: We thank Jim Bessen, Hélène Dernis, Megan MacGarvie, Paola Giuri, Myriam Mariani, Kazu Motohashi, Teruo Okazaki, James Rollinson, Philipp Sander, Georg Van Graevenitz, Stephan Wagner, Norihiko Yamano, Maria Pluvia Zuniga, and all the participants at the PATSTAT Users’ Meeting in Paris in March 2008 and seminars,at the Ludwig-Maximi...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sussex, 1994.