Search results

In this study, the authors dive into the assessment process of startups by impact investors. In particular, the purpose of this study is to investigate the preferences impact investors place on different social and environmental criteria. The authors build on social learning theory to understand the underlying rationale of the investors.

With this research, the authors simplify the impact category system by conducting a systematic literature review. The authors then validate these criteria with a survey of 69 impact investors in Europe.

The results highlight the prioritization of quantifying impact and a discrepancy between essential and desirable impact categories. Due to the clear and significant results changing with the target market and startup stage focus, the authors assume a tendency of homophily of impact investors.

With this empirical study, the authors offer strategic implications for investors and startups as the authors decrease the complexity of impact categories while validating their significance in the impact assessment process.

Innovation diffusion points toward how innovations spread into the market after launch. This paper investigates diffusion dynamics at market entry time and proposes a new evolution pattern at the intersection between inventions and innovations. With this in mind, we initially prove that patent filings correlate with new product introductions in the U.S. spine market. Then we test our new theory supposing that certain patent filing threshold numbers accelerate strong economic returns in terms of innovations. We find that firms hitting certain patent filing thresholds significantly increase their product launches in the mentioned market. Moreover, the results seem to indicate that economic returns of inventions may be measured substantially. Thus, this paper suggests a new research area by utilizing our proposed concept about an Innovation Outcome Trigger Value (IOTV). Furthermore, the implications may also be interesting for practitioners, since we empirically prove that inventive activities turn out to be worthwhile, indeed.

This study addresses aspects of governmental influence on innovation by analyzing the impact of the ObamaCare excise tax on the medical device industry. We initially give an overview of common approaches to measuring innovativeness and entrepreneurship, empirically assess whether existing metrics are suitable for investigating the innovation performance of the U.S. medical device industry, and define a new measure (firm innovation activity) for entrepreneurship. Then we perform a quantitative analysis to explore the impact of the tax. We analyze more than 60,000 product clearances from 1996 to 2013, using the FDA database. We find a significant relationship between product counts and revenues for one segment. Contrary to the present criticism of the excise tax, we find hardly any noteworthy response in either firm innovation activity or number of products launched in the year after the tax was introduced. The 2013 reduction of new product submissions is well within the limits of typical annual fluctuations observed in previous years. This provides a first indication that the excise tax act did not have a strong impact on innovative activities through the present.