Wilfred Dolfsma

Wilfred Dolfsma
Loughborough University in London · glendenbrook Center for Enterprise Development

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170
Publications
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3,227
Citations

Publications

Publications (170)
Article
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In recent years, the rapid growth of user-generated content has led to much research evaluating the patterns of online information exchange. These studies demonstrate that online communities are valuable data sources which provide rich, longitudinal data that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible to access. Given the increased research in...
Article
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Suggesting socio-cultural values are selectors of institutions and institutional practices, and institutions in turn are selectors of (economic) behaviors, we investigate what explains the persistence of institutions that were aligned with past socio-cultural values when the values subscribed to in society have fundamentally changed. What, in other...
Article
Coopetition may help firms to respond collectively to technological change, and compete against disruptive innovation. Yet, coopetition often creates tensions, as coopetitors need to engage in persistently contradictory activities. While existing research focuses on dyadic coopetition, we know much less about multilateral coopetition; specifically,...
Article
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p>Efficient knowledge and information transfer within as well as across organizational boundaries are of a proven importance for survival and growth of firms. At the same time, however, on the one hand, knowledge available within organizations is not always used to its full capacity, at times at the considerable detriment of organizations involved....
Article
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Purpose All firms' business models are based on their interdependencies with other parties in their ecosystems. The Internet of Things (IoT) is beginning to fundamentally disrupt the agri-food industry, forcing the ecosystem to change. When an ecosystem is transforming, the interdependencies among its actors can create friction. Technology provider...
Article
p>The Stage-Gate process is a tool used by innovation managers to rationalize resource allocation the innovation process by breaking the innovation process into different stages, and determining progress and prospects at gates using pre-determined criteria. This study determines the performance impact of investing financial resources relatively hea...
Article
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We propose to analyze the supply chain not (just) as interconnected firms where products move from primary production, through processing, down to final consumer (user), but rather as collaborating firms that exchange information in order for each to function. This opens the analysis of supply chains up for institutional economic analysis and also...
Article
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Innovation is about individuals collaborating to share existing knowledge and create new knowledge. Increasingly these collaborations cross organisational boundaries, like in R&D alliances. Many of these alliances are coopetitive, partners cooperate, but also compete with each other. Although knowledge sharing in coopetitive settings has been studi...
Article
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How markets and firms function is critically related to what knowledge and information is exchanged between whom, how quickly. Exchange of (symbolic) information needs to be properly institutionalized in order to be understood by others, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, cannot avoid being ambiguous to some degree as well (Dolfsma et al. 201...
Article
This study examines individual knowledge sharing in a coopetitive R&D alliance. R&D is increasingly carried out in an R&D alliance setting, where individuals share highly specialized tacit knowledge crossing firm boundaries. A particular challenging setting is the coopetitive R&D alliance, where partner firms partially compete and individuals may l...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review and assess the different strategies that what we call Info-firms can deploy in the markets that they serve. In many markets, a firm’s competitive advantage is derived from its information position. Firms that actively and extensively collect customer information may develop a number of strategies to in...
Article
The industrial development in sub-Saharan Africa is perhaps more affected by the quality of institutions than that of other regions. We investigate what alternatives managers may have and what their firms would need to function in case the institutional furniture they encounter is of low quality. We find that, in high quality institutional environm...
Article
A discretionary social network in a firm is where individual employees voluntarily share new, innovative knowledge – activities in this network are essential to firm innovation. Drawing on a unique field study we quantitatively compare the situation before and after a ‘simple’ management intervention aimed at increasing discretionary social network...
Article
The literature on “open innovation” so far focuses almost exclusively on strategic issues. In this largely conceptual paper we propose behavioral foundations for knowledge exchange and knowledge sharing to address this gap in the literature. Innovation and knowledge development that result from knowledge transfer, is an uncertain and cumulative pro...
Article
Analysing a unique, domain-similar database including all horticulturalists in a major flower-producing country, this paper shows that a firm’s central position in a network significantly improves its financial performance. The effect of strategic positioning in a network is in large part mediated through its enhanced innovativeness. Strategically...
Article
The first five merger waves were US-led events. In this article we show that the largely over-looked sixth wave (2003–2008) emerged in all regions simultaneously. Because of this, and building upon interconnected literatures – which: (1) suggests that agency is a big predictor of merger performance; (2) distinguishes between three distinct governan...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of board diversity on the extent to which firms invest in R&D. Design/methodology/approach Based on data collected about the composition of the board of directors, we determine statistically if the characteristics of directors predicts the extent to which firms invest more in R&D. Fin...
Article
Social networks are an important driver for successful innovation, both at the individual level as well as the organizational level. Recent research has also shaped that networks within teams can enhance performance. Innovative project teams are embedded in an organizational context, however, and teams typically consist of people with expertise fro...
Article
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In this article we first provide a brief introduction into social network analysis, focusing on the measures and approaches that are used in the empirical contributions in this special issue. Second, we discuss the role of social networks in new product development. Social networks are inherently multilevel; we consider four “levels”: networks insi...
Article
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Organizations are complex social systems that are not easy to understand, yet they must be managed if a company is to succeed. This book explains networks and how managers and organizations can navigate them to produce successful strategic innovation outcomes. Although managers are increasingly aware of the importance of social relations for the in...
Research
Abstract This paper explores the practices used to facilitate knowledge transfer in collaborative research project between academics and industry. What are the barriers to knowledge transfer in University-Industry (U-I) research collaboration and what are practices to overcome these barriers, as represented in literature? The most important barrier...
Article
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Welke strategie draagt er aan bij dat een bedrijf innovatiever en uiteindelijk succesvoller wordt? In een bedrijfstakspecifieke studie, gebruikmakend van unieke data, zien we dat klassieke strategieën als kostleiderschap, nastreven van schaalvoordelen en het op een gunstige locatie gevestigd zijn (clustering) niet het verwachte effect hebben. Goed...
Article
The distance between actors in an organization affects how they interact with each other, and particularly whether they will exchange (innovative) knowledge with each other. Actors in each other's proximity have fewer conflicts, more trust towards each other, for example, and are thus more involved in knowledge transfer. Actors close to others thus...
Article
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McCarthy K. J. and Dolfsma W. The euro and its impact on the number, size, performance and regional spread of European mergers and acquisitions, Regional Studies. The macroeconomic effects of the euro have been extensively studied. The literature has, however, paid significantly less attention to the microeconomic consequences and few authors have...
Article
As firms are increasingly exposed to disruptive innovations that affect their operations, their ability to effectively respond to such disruptions is essential to both their competitiveness and long term success. This study contributes to existing disruptive innovation research by going beyond the mere identification of the effect of, and response...
Article
Studies of alliances, and R&D alliances in particular, focus mostly on issues at the meso and macro levels of analysis. It may be for this reason that it remains unclear what explains their success (or rather, their failure). Despite calls, few studies have been able to study the micro dynamics inside an alliance (Zollo et al. 2002). The inner-work...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper explores the practices used to facilitate knowledge transfer in collaborative research project between academics and industry. What are the barriers to knowledge transfer in University-Industry (U-I) research collaboration and what are practices to overcome these barriers, as represented in literature? The most important barriers to know...
Article
Full-text available
Emphasizing the dynamics in economies and industries, Schumpeter points to entrepreneurs carrying out 'new combinations'. His work, and in particular the Theory of Economic Development, is often interpreted as praising individual entrepreneurs setting up new firms to contribute to an industry's innovativeness. This has come to be referred to as the...
Article
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Firm reorganizations deeply affect employees. Management can reorganize in different ways, focusing on costs or acknowledging the involvement of employees. The latter implies following a social contract that complements incomplete (formal) labor contracts. Little is known about how the way in which firms reorganize affects their subsequent performa...
Article
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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how to nourish innovation during the course of a downsizing event. Drawing from an array of intra-organizational network studies, we show how management can use its understanding of the existing formal and informal networks to rewire connections between employees. Downsizing always leaves scars....
Article
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Reorganiseren wordt steeds gebruikelijker en vindt niet alleen plaats om direct kosten te kunnen besparen. Er is veel bekend over de effecten van reorganiseren voor medewerkers, maar weinig over de vraag naar het effect op het bedrijfsresultaat nadien en naar de wijze waarop gereorganiseerd wordt. Moeten bedrijven zich de stress en onzekerheid bij...
Article
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Three major surveys of professional journalists, in 1976, 1986, and 1996, suggest that the vast majority consider themselves to be neutral, objective, and balanced observers, whose role is merely to provide information. But how neutral is the media, in terms of its orientation and effects on the behavior of the markets? In this paper, we unite a nu...
Article
We show that contacts in formal, informal and especially multiplex networks explain transfer of innovative knowledge in an organization. The contribution of informal contacts has been much acknowledged, while that of formal contacts did not receive much attention in the literature in recent decades. No study thus far has included both these differe...
Article
While unavoidable at times, corporate reorganization by downsizing is widely believed to hurt a firm’s innovativeness. This paper studies the changes, over time, in the innovation network at a large, multinational in the financial services industry as it endured downsizing. While reducing the absolute size of the innovation community substantially,...
Article
Reports on the effects of government's role in stimulating technological development provide a mixed picture. Some policies have had the expected, stimulating effect and other policies have not. We suggest that specific characteristics of technologies that government has sought to stimulate have not been taken into account when governments formulat...
Article
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Taking the idea that institutional reproduction is not obvious and that institutions are vulnerable has significant conceptual implications. Institutional vulnerability can arise through communication between actors in a common language. To apprehend this requires an elaboration of John Searle's (1995, 2005) argument that language is the fundamenta...
Article
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Services form an important part of the economy today. Innovation for service firms is as important as for manufacturing, but the innovation process for service firms is comparatively little studied. In this paper, I review the literature there is on the innovation process for service firms, and make two suggestions for formalizing that process. The...
Article
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Economists tend to see the market as a default option for social order and a role for government only when markets fail. Developing a convincing analysis of the role of government in economic processes, however, needs to start by considering government failure in its own terms. Drawing on insights from institutional economics, law and economics and...
Article
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The appropriability regime (Teece 1986) that innovating service firms face is generally weaker than what firms in manufacturing sectors face. An important means to appropriate benefits from innovation that service firms can use is their reputation. This conceptual paper offers insights into how a firm’s reputation helps in appropriating value from...
Article
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Research in the domain of 'Innovation Studies' has been claimed to allow for the study of how technology will develop in the future. Some suggest that the National and Sectoral Innovation Systems literature has become bogged down, however, into case studies of how specific institutions affect innovation in a specific country. A useful notion for po...
Article
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From an institutionalist perspective, we identify five sources of policy conflict. Each may explain why policies intended to obtain particular goals for an institutionalized practice may have unintended consequences. We illustrate by analyzing attempts at introducing market-oriented reform in health care provision.
Article
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to further the development of strategic thinking, relevant for both academics and practitioners, about a key asset in the knowledge economy: patents. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on existing insights on the strategic use of patents, presenting them in a coherent framework. Findings The paper di...
Book
'The emerging knowledge economy is prompting decisive changes in the organization of business firms. Corporate hierarchies flatten under the impact of ICT and the need to delegate decision rights. The boundaries of the firm shrink under the impact of outsourcing and viable relational contracting. However, we still know very little about the mechani...
Article
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Is the biological metaphor the proper one for evolutionary economics to pur-sue, given that it leads one to incorporate more from biology as an academicdiscipline than would be called for? Is the economy, the subject of analysis foreconomists, not fundamentally different from a biological or a natural system?These are the topics of ongoing discussi...
Article
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Evolutionary economics has developed into an academic field of its own, institutionalized around, amongst others, the Journal of Evolutionary Economics (JEE). This paper analyzes the way and extent to which evolutionary economics has become an interdisciplinary journal, as its aim was: a journal that is indispensable in the exchange of expert knowl...
Article
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Can the knowledge base of an economy be measured? In this study, we combine the perspective of regional economics on the interrelationships among technology, organization, and territory with the triple-helix model, and offer the mutual information in three dimensions as an indicator of the configuration. When this probabilistic entropy is negative,...
Chapter
The notion of path dependence was first explicitly applied in the field of economics, in particular to explain the persistence of certain technologies and standards (David, 1985; Arthur, 1989). It has been discussed in recent decades in other disciplines as well, and has been found to be a useful way of analyzing a range of subjects. The concept ha...
Article
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Purpose This paper aims to provide a view and analysis of the immediate field of journals that surround a number of key heterodox economics journals. Design/methodology/approach Using citation data from the Science and Social Science Citation Index, the individual and collective networks of a number of journals in this field are analyzed. Finding...
Article
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The prevailing models explaining how technologies develop along a specific trajectory largely focus on the circumstances that lead to technological lock-in. We contribute substantially to this area of research by investigating the circumstances under which technological development may break-out of a trajectory. We argue that for this to happen, a...
Article
A bstract Over time, economics has experienced paradigm shifts, and there is every reason to think this will continue. In economics, as in the development of technological knowledge, paradigms do not emerge from nowhere, but build on precursors, possibly from other fields. Our understanding of current economic thinking can be enhanced by paying gre...
Article
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The concept of social capital helps to explain relations within and between companies but has not crystallized yet. As such, the nature, development, and effects of such relations remain elusive. How is social capital created, how is it put to use, and how is it maintained? Can it decline, and if so, how? We argue that the concept of social capital...
Article
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This study makes a number of observations about the way in which the current crisis in particular, but economic crises more generally, are reported upon by the media. Considering terminology used to describe the financial crisis of 2007/2008 by employing a dataset of 956 articles from >i>The Economist>/i>, we study what terms are used, why, and how...
Article
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to disentangle and elaborate on the constitutive elements of the concept of path dependence (initial conditions and lock‐in) for a concerted and in‐depth application to the study of organizational change. Design/methodology/approach The approach takes the form of a combination of a longitudinal and a comparativ...
Article
De uitgaven aan onderzoek in Nederland zijn laag in vergelijking met andere landen. De efficiëntie van het omzetten van input in output verschilt sterk per land en is historisch-institutioneel bepaald. Bij het nastreven van een stevigere positie in het internationale onderzoeksveld zijn er afnemende meeropbrengsten. Een en ander beperkt de haalbaar...
Article
The global economy is changing rapidly and multinational corporations (MNCs) are at the forefront of this transformation. This book provides novel and profound analyses of how MNCs and emerging economies are related, and how this relationship affects the dynamics of the global economy. In particular, the authors deal with the nexus between multinat...
Article
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Dezer dagen worden de faculteiten economie en bedrijfskunde in het land gevisiteerd. Geproduceerde wetenschappelijke artikelen in een tevoren geselecteerde lijst van tijdschriften zullen tellen. Netwerk- en scientometrische analyses laten zien dat economie en bedrijfskunde relatief los van elkaar staan. Tijdschriften die de verbinding maken en ook...
Article
Over time, economics has experienced paradigm shifts, and there is every reason to think this will continue. In economics, as in the development of technological knowledge, paradigms do not emerge from nowhere, but build on precursors, possibly from other fields. Our understanding of current economic thinking can be enhanced by paying greater atten...
Article
The creation of new knowledge is a haphazard process: not every sector in an economy is equally involved. The effect of industry structure on innovativeness has been a focus of attention for a long time by both academics and policymakers. In a much quoted article, using unique data - new-product announcements - Acs and Audretsch [Acs, Z.J., Audrets...
Article
Research on institutional change has flourished ever since the debate on agency and structure has moved away from the previously uncompromising positions in which either agency or structure was emphasized. A conceptual compromise is sought here in a focus on the processes of institutionalization, which allows one to move beyond the idea that instit...
Article
In this paper we offer a way to measure the knowledge base of an economy in terms of probabilistic entropy. This measure, we hypothesize, is an indication of the extent to which a system, including the economic system, self-organizes. In a self-organizing system, interactions between dimensions or subsystems will unintentionally give rise to antici...
Article
Intellectual Property Rights take on a different significance in the knowledge economy and on the internet. Their expanding role is not necessarily a beneficial development for the economy a dynamic welfare analysis indicates. The effects of IPRs is compounded by the newly emerging relations between producers and consumers in which the latter are i...
Article
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The Carthaginians say also this that there is a place in Libya, and People living in it, beyond the Pillars of Heracles. When they, the Carthaginians, come there and disembark their cargo, they range it along the seashore and go back again to their boats and light a smoke signal. The natives, as soon as they see the smoke, come down to the shore an...
Article
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While patent data offers a quantitative measure, they are often used in a rather unimaginative way. Patents granted are aggregated to the level of firms, regions, sectors or countries to determine the respective aggregate’s (potential) (future) significance. While patent data is Globalisation of knowledge development and delivery, ISID, New Delhi...
Article
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In this paper we investigate which elements in both an industry’s structure and in an industry’s dynamics affect innovativeness. We use the most appropriate measure for innovativeness –new product announcements- to find specifically that dominance of large firms consistently affect industry innovativeness negatively. Other industry structure charac...
Article
Exchanging knowledge between individuals working in a firm, between but even within divisions, does not occur automatically (Szulanski 1996). It is not obvious that people exchange ideas, point each other to information that the other might use, or give feedback, even when they have no evil motives for not cooperating in such a manner. As a firm's...
Book
'Davis and Dolfsma have edited a volume of 36 essays that provides a first-rate introduction to the recent cutting-edge scholarship in social economics. . . the volume provides an impressive and broad array of articles covering traditional social economic topics. . . Each essay is an excellent point of entry into social economic thought. This volum...
Article
This book makes a strong and coherent contribution to the discussion of the knowledge economy and of innovation, offering a range of theoretical insights from different disciplinary perspectives. The role of knowledge, knowledge development, and knowledge diffusion is discussed at the micro level of individuals and firms, but also at the level of g...
Article
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In their seminal paper, Acs and Audretsch (1988) analyze innovation patterns across industries and identify several determinants of innovativeness, both positive and negative. Their work is seminal if only because of the unique data they use to measure innovativeness: new-product announcements. They show that industry concentration, degree of union...
Article
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In the year 2000 some $142 billion in royalties were paid internationally by users of a specific piece of knowledge that were protected under Intellectual Property Right law (IPR) to those parties that owned these rights. Under current circumstances where knowledge & innovation play an increasingly significant role in the economy (Foray & Lundvall...
Article
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In this article it is argued that there are notable parallels between all of the different strands within ethics on the one hand, and accountancy on the other that, in teaching, can be drawn upon to enhance students’ understanding of the latter. Accountancy, part of economics, draws on utilitarian ethics, but not solely so. Accounting, in addition,...
Article
Full-text available
Can the knowledge base of an economy be measured? In this study, we combine the perspective of regional economics on the interrelationships among technology, organization, and territory with the triple-helix model, and offer the mutual information in three dimensions as an indicator of the configuration. When this probabilistic entropy is negative,...

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