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. Two 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 selective use of openness for competive advantage:
   1. The role of product compatibility standards in both technology adoption and intra-industry competition. He has presented and published a number of papers on proprietary and open platforms, standards competition and software ecosystems.
   2. 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 numerous papers on the topic since 2000, and shared his insights from this research at industry conferences.
   3. Open Innovation. He worked with Henry Chesbrough and Wim Vanhaverbeke to produce an academic edited book on open innovation, entitled Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, published in 2006 by Oxford University Press (and released in paperback in 2008).

Specific Papers

Joel has been active in several theoretical domains

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

His research focuses on technology-based industries, including:

• clean technologies, specifically renewable energy
• information technologies: computers (open source software, software, personal computers) and 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 October 28, 2011

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