No abstract

Prior research on corporate innovation highlights the importance of accessing external knowledge from other firms and universities. However, survey evidence indicates that product users are perhaps the most important source of external knowledge. We build on existing theory to identify the conditions under which user knowledge contributes to corporate innovation and when the benefits will be greatest. Using a panel dataset of medical device companies and their collaborative efforts with innovative physicians, we find evidence that inventive collaborations with users enhance corporate product innovation and that the benefits are greatest in new technology areas and in the generation of radical innovations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper investigates the relationship between patenting and publication of research results by university faculty members. Our study adds to the limited evidence on this topic with an empirical investigation based on a panel data set for a broad sample of university researchers. Results suggest that publication and patenting are complementary, not substitute, activities for faculty members. This is not consistent with recent concerns regarding deleterious effects of patenting on the research output of faculty members. Average citations to publications, however, appear to decline for repeat patenters, suggesting either a decrease in quality or restrictions on use associated in patent protection.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that innovative medical devices often arise from physicians' inventive activity, but no studies have documented the extent of such physicianengaged innovation. This paper uses patent data and the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile to provide evidence that physicians contribute to medical device innovation, accounting for almost 20 percent of approximately 26,000 medical device patents filed in the United States during 1990-1996. Moreover, two measures indicate that physician patents had more influence on subsequent inventive activity than nonphysician patents. This finding supports the maintenance of an open environment for physician-industry collaboration in the medical device discovery process. [Health Affairs 27, no. 6 (2008): 1532-1543 10.1377/hlthaff.27.6.1532 T h e r e i s c o n s i d e r a b l e c o n t r o v e r s y over relationships between medical device companies and practicing physicians. Media outlets have recently highlighted conflicts of interest that can arise from close collaboration between physicians and medical device companies. 1 In particular, concerns have been raised about physicians' financial conflicts of interest in recruiting patients to clinical trials and in reporting results of clinical testing to the medical community. 2 Critics worry that payments by medical device companies to practicing physicians will influence their decisions about which devices to use and how to document patient outcomes and, in turn, will compromise patients' welfare.By contrast, device firms and physicians that work with them argue that the corporate relationships are essential to device innovation. In this view, physicians provide essential knowledge of technology and medical practice that become in-

Strategic management research increasingly examines firms’ strategies for corporate environmental and social disclosures. There are benefits to being perceived as having superior environmental performance, but firms face increasing pressure to provide more complete disclosures, potentially exposing information that will be viewed negatively by external stakeholders. We examine linguistic obfuscation as a means to balance this tension. In particular, we argue that firms may intentionally make their disclosures more complex and harder to understand, thereby blurring the negative content and increasing information processing costs of the recipient. In the context in which an information intermediary actively collects information from firms and evaluates them, we find that firms with unfavorable news to disclose use linguistic obfuscation in information disclosure to manage the tension between the pressure for more complete disclosures and the desire to project a positive image. We further demonstrate that obfuscation lessens the negative impact of reporting negative information on environmental performance ratings given by information intermediaries. This suggests that firms can and do use linguistic tactics to influence environmental ratings.