Guido Buenstorf

Heritage and Agglomeration: The Akron Tyre Cluster Revisited*

We use new data on the location and background of entrants into the U.S. tire industry to analyze the factors that caused the industry to be so regionally concentrated around Akron, Ohio, a small city with no particular advantages for tire production. We analyze the states where firms entered and for the Ohio entrants the counties where they originated and entered, and we conduct various analyses of how proximity to other tire firms and to demanders affected the longevity of tire producers. We also examine how the heritage of the Ohio entrants influenced their longevity. Our findings suggest that the Akron tire cluster grew primarily through a process of organizational reproduction and heredity rather than through agglomeration economies, as has been commonly posited by scholars of the industry.

Self-organization and sustainability: energetics of evolution and implications for ecological economics

Abstract In the 1920s, Alfred Lotka suggested that evolution results both in an increasing total energy flow through the biosphere and in increasing energy efficiency of biological processes. Later authors attempted to generalize Lotkas conjectures and to transform them into general evolutionary laws. These laws are derived from the laws of thermodynamics, and it is frequently argued that they also apply to the development of economic systems. In the present paper, an alternative interpretation of the Lotka principles is suggested which starts from the self-organization of dissipative structures. Self-organization concepts from ecological and evolutionary economics are integrated. On this basis, energetic regularities in evolutionary processes are interpreted as emergent properties of competitive self-organization. Given the close relationship between energy dissipation in economic processes and various environmental problems, thermodynamic effects of economic evolution are of practical policy relevance. The evolutionary perspective taken here implies that policy measures toward sustainable development will primarily have to affect the kinds of innovative behavior triggered in competitive processes.

Opportunity spin-offs and necessity spin-offs

This paper proposes a new distinction between two types of spin-offs, which is based on the events triggering spin-off formation. Spin-offs induced by newly discovered opportunities are distinguished from necessity spin-offs organised to escape deteriorating job conditions. An empirical analysis of spin-offs in the German laser industry traces differences in the performance and determinants of the two spin-off types. Necessity spin-offs are important to limit the devaluation of individual human capital by the competitive market process.

Designing clunkers: demand-side innovation and the early history of the mountain bike

Innovation studies in economics tend to focus on the supply side and to assign a passive role to consumers. This passivity of consumers in innovation processes is questioned by the present paper. It is suggested that supply-side considerations alone may be insufficient to account for innovations in consumer good industries. Based on the example of the early development of the mountain bike, the paper shows how consumers may be the dominant actors in consumer good innovations. It is demonstrated that the basic features of mountain bikes had already been established when commercial interests entered the industry, and that development of the mountain bike cannot be understood unless the group setting of its origins is taken into account. To explain the development of the mountain bike, economic, sociological, and psychological concepts are integrated. The dynamics identified in the present case study may hold for a broader class of commodities.

Regional Knowledge, Organizational Capabilities and the Emergence of the West German Laser Systems Industry, 1975–2005

Buenstorf G., Fritsch M. and Medrano L. F. Regional knowledge, organizational capabilities and the emergence of the West German laser systems industry, 1975–2005, Regional Studies. This paper analyses how the regional distribution of knowledge and pre-existing organizational capabilities shaped the spatial distribution of a new innovative industry, using the German laser systems industry as an empirical example. It is found that regional knowledge in the related field of laser source production and the presence of laser-relevant universities and public research organizations were conducive to the first emergence of laser systems producers. Upstream laser source producers influenced entry into the downstream laser systems industry primarily through their own diversification moves. Public research was less important in the submarket of materials processing laser systems, which is less directly science based than other parts of the laser systems industry.

Like Doktorvater, like Son? Tracing Role Model Learning in the Evolution of German Laser Research

Summary We trace individual-level learning and knowledge transfer in public research by matching about 5,000 doctoral dissertations and their advisors over the full history of German laser research. We study the number of laser-related dissertations per advisor, publication and patent outputs of advisors and doctoral students, as well as the likelihood that former students started laser firms or attained professorships. Our results suggest a substantial relevance of non-codified knowledge and role model learning in public research. There is little evidence of pronounced barriers to entry into laser research.

Playing the `Name Game' to identify academic patents in Germany

Identifying academic inventors is crucial for reliable assessments of academic patenting and for understanding patent-based university-to-industry technology transfer. It requires solving the “who is who” problem at the individual inventor level. This article describes data collection and matching techniques applied to identify academic inventors in Germany. To manage the large dataset, we adjust a matching technique applied in prior research by comparing the inventor and professor names in the first step after cleaning. We also suggest a new approach for determining the similarity score. To evaluate our methodology we apply it to the EP-INV-PatStat database and compare its results to alternative approaches. For our German data, results are less sensitive to the choice of name comparison algorithm than to the specific filtering criteria employed. Restricting the search to EPO applications or identifying inventors by professor title underestimates academic patenting in Germany.

Evolution, organization and economic behavior

This new and original collection of papers focuses on the intersection of three strands of research: evolutionary economics, behavioral economics, and management studies. Combining theoretical and empirical contributions, the expert contributors demonstrate that the intersection of these fields provides a rich source of opportunities enabling researchers to find more satisfactory answers to questions that (not only evolutionary) economists have long been tackling. Topics discussed include individual agents and their interactions; the behavior and development of firm organizations; and evolving firms and their broader implications for the development of regions and entire economies.

Complementarity, Cognition and Capabilities: Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Production

This book is based on the premise that mainstream economics has become excessively specialized and formalized, entering a state of de facto withdrawal from the study of the economy in favour of exercises in applied mathematics. The editors believe that there is much scope for synergies by engaging in an encounter with economics and the other social sciences. The chapters in this book offer important new contributions to such a development.

The next generation (plus one): an analysis of doctoral students’ academic fecundity based on a novel approach to advisor identification

Scientific communities reproduce themselves by allowing senior scientists to educate young researchers, in particular through the training of doctoral students. This process of reproduction is imperfectly understood, in part because there are few large-scale datasets linking doctoral students to their advisors. We present a novel approach employing machine learning techniques to identify advisors among (frequent) co-authors in doctoral students’ publications. This approach enabled us to construct an original dataset encompassing more than 20,000 doctoral student-advisor pairs in applied physics and electrical engineering from German universities, 1975–2005. We employ this dataset to analyze the “fecundity” of doctoral students, i.e. their probability to become advisors themselves.