Research Streams

Joel West’s research focuses on topics in innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly topics related to the effect of technological change on industry structure over time. Four major areas of interest are:

1. The creation of new industries and firms as the result of radical technological innovation. He has studied the birth and growth of the global mobile telephone industry from 1946 to the present. As part of his research on entrepreneurship, he is analyzing the birth and growth of more than 200 startup companies in a wireless communications regional economy.
2. The role of product compatibility standards in both technology adoption and intra-industry competition. He has presented and published a number of papers on standards competition, and chairs an annual conference track on IT standards.
3. The growth of open source and free software. With various colleagues, he has studied the adoption of open source, the use of open source as a competitive strategy by major I.T. firms, and the impact of open source as a competition for such firms. He has authored several papers on the topic and shared his insights from this research at industry conferences.
4. Open Innovation. He worked with Henry Chesbrough and Wim Vanhaverbeke to produce an academic edited book on open innovation, to be published in 2006 by Oxford University Press.

Specific Papers

Joel has been active in several theoretical domains

• entrepreneurship
• innovation adoption and open innovation
• intellectual property
• international
• standards and standardization

The bulk of his work spans specific ICT industry contexts:

• computers: open source software, software and personal computers
• telecommunications: wireless communications, Internet

In a previous career, he also did work related to computer science.

Complete Publications

Some papers overlap multiple topics; for a complete curriculum vitae with merged references, click here.

Also see the index of publications compiled by Google, DBLP, Repec, AIS

Last Updated February 1, 2007

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