TY  - JOUR
AU  - Zucker,Lynne G.
AU  - Darby,Michael R.
TI  - Costly Information in Firm Transformation, Exit, or Persistent Failure
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5577
PY  - 1996
Y2  - November 1996
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5577
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5577.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Lynne G. Zucker
Departments of Sociology & Public Policy
UCLA
Box 951551
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551
Tel: 310/825-9155
Fax: 310/454-2748
E-Mail: zucker@ucla.edu

Michael R. Darby
John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management
University of California, Los Angeles
110 Westwood Plaza, Box 951481
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1481
Tel: 310/825-4180
Fax: 310/454-2748
E-Mail: michael.r.darby@anderson.ucla.edu
AB  - Firms invest differentially in the intellectual human capital required to recognize, evaluate, and utilize technological breakthroughs occurring outside the firm.  Such differential investment has been crucial in explaining which incumbent pharmaceutical firms have successfully transformed their technological identities in response to the biotechnological revolution and which are threatened by persistent low performance.  While all incumbent firms lagged the dedicated new biotechnology firms in adopting the new drug-discovery technology, firms with higher R&D expenditures before the biotech revolution were more likely to successfully adopt the new techniques and likely to do so earlier.  Failure to adopt the new techniques was associated with lower performance compared to firms adopting more fully and faster.
ER  -