William Latham Christian Le Bas Persistence of firm innovative behavior became an important topic in applied industrial organization with the publication of the seminal empirical work of P. Geroski and his colleagues (1997). Evidence that firms innovate persistently has led previous studies to focus on the determinants of innovation persistence and on its heterogeneity across industries, technologies and countries. The aims of this book are: (1) to illumine the scale and scope of the phenomenon of persistence in innovation, and (2) to account for the principal factors that explain why some...

The research incorporated in this monograph was initially undertaken as part of a Ph. D. dissertation submitted to the University of lllinois in 1973. Revisions were accomplished at the University of Delaware. I want to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Hugh O. Nourse who suggested the investigation, Paul Chouinard who ably and accurately translated verbal instructions into computer programmes, and Harold F. Williamson, Jr. and Peter Nijkamp who commented atlength on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Rapid and accurate typing of several drafts of the manuscript and valuable editorial...