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This chapter focuses upon two types of interaction. One is the interaction between departments within the Danish Trademark and Patent Office (DKPTO). Additionally, the interaction between the DKPTO and firms is analysed. The chapter discusses in what ways an institution like a national patent office is important for product innovation, not just by providing an appropriability system for product innovations in firms, but additionally by improving the long-run capabilities of both firms and the DKPTO itself. The research builds upon interviews in the DKPTO, case stories from firms and of patent granting procedures.

With respect to internal competencies, it is found that no efforts were carried out to create environments for learning between the departments in line with the “learning organizations” described in earlier chapters. However, taking the tasks of the departments into account, the need for such efforts was not obvious. Links to external organizations are not only confined to industrial firms. Many firms, especially the large firms, would not mind if the tasks of the national patent system were moved to the EPO-level. On the other hand, in particular, small, new firms may feel more confident with a national patent office.

The implemented European Union Services Directive aimed at creating a unified European market for trade in services. However, the implementation of the institutions was not fully successful as to the characteristics of international services caused challenges in the ratification of the Directive. Research on international services is facing similar challenges based on the fragmented, inconclusive, and at times even contradictory findings of international services literature with regard to service characteristics. Thus, each academic field of international business, economic geography, and service management has tried to identify international service characteristics, but no unified characterization is found. The challenges in defining the different types of services, difference in the levels of analysis, and various impacts of policies and institutional environments on the service, cause these differences. The authors see the need for a unified framework that combines the different literatures and considers the policy implications. The authors develop a framework consisting of four components of international service characteristics, that is, the connectivity of service actors to the environment, the configuration of service activities within organizational set-ups, the dyadic collaborative interaction between service actors, and the created value by the services. The authors specifically consider policy and institutions as well as a vast variety of literature streams to support the arguments.

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to analyze the factors that lead firms to offshore advanced tasks.

Methodology/approach – The study uses a 1,500-firm survey from Denmark to investigate the offshoring of 12 tradable manufacturing, technical, and service activities across different industries.

Findings – Findings indicate that offshoring of advanced tasks is driven by a different set of strategic motives than previous waves of offshoring, which predominantly included simple and standardized routine tasks. While the lower cost of unskilled, labor-intensive processes is the incentive for firms that offshore less advanced tasks, a desire to broaden and deepen global networks of new knowledge spurs highly knowledge-intensive companies to offshore more advanced tasks.

Originality/value of chapter – We propose that offshoring should be analyzed on a more disaggregated level of analysis than is the norm in mainstream offshoring literature. To reflect the trend whereby firms are “slicing” their value chain in finer and finer parts and locate these in various locations around the world, offshoring should be analyzed at the task level, since this paves the way for a richer understanding of offshoring strategies and processes.

This volume of Progress in International Business Research includes a selection of 13 papers from the 35th European International Business Academy (EIBA) annual conference, which was held in Valencia (Spain) from the 13 to the 15 of December 2009. Following the usual guidelines for EIBA annual conference organization, papers submitted to this conference had a double-blind revision process. The acceptance rate for oral presentations was 68%.

The chapter discusses the characteristics of audiovisual (AV) media sectors in the Baltic Sea region. Therein it focuses on the specifics of media industries in small countries in the region as they are challenged in ways notably different from large countries with large domestic markets for media content. It discusses the differences between the AV media industries in the Nordic and Baltic countries and suggests that while in the first case long-term welfare society policies and conscious policy-driven system building have conditioned growth and international success then also in the second case innovation policy rationales have facilitated recent growth and dynamics. It then discusses the specific challenges, especially platformisation to small media industries in contemporary globalising media markets, and suggests that opportunities to resist these challenges may be in local inter-sectoral cooperation, that is, in building cross-innovation systems.