Dr. Hannes W. Lampe

The hidden champion concept has received much interest in practice. As market leaders in niche markets, hidden champions represent the success of the (German) Mittelstand. Innovation is a key element of their strategy and their focus and niche market strategy are associated with specific technological capabilities. However, thus far, little quantitative empirical evidence exists about the innovation output of hidden champions. Drawing on a capability perspective and using patent data, the present study analyzes differences between hidden champions and comparable non‐hidden champion firms in their technological innovation. Our results show that hidden champions have a significantly larger technological innovation output but do not have a higher efficiency in their innovation creation compared to other firms from the same industry, size, and age. Moreover, the innovations produced by hidden champions show higher levels of technological depth and indicate lower levels of technological breadth. The sources of technological knowledge of hidden champions seem to be more inward oriented. Finally, innovations of hidden champions have similar technological impact, novelty and quality compared to those of other firms. Overall, our study supports many of the anecdotal beliefs about the innovation of hidden champions contributing to a better understanding of what makes hidden champions different from other Mittelstand firms. Practical implications for hidden champions and Mittelstand firms are discussed.

This article investigates how crowdsourcing for knowledge creation in a crucial knowledge‐intense task – patent application examination – informs decision‐making. It is hypothesized that patent examiners’ views underly a local search bias (i.e., they rely on locally preferred and conveniently available local information), which may be overcome through crowdsourcing. To analyze this potential effect of crowdsourcing, this study analyzes USPTO’s Peer To Patent initiative, opening the patent examination process to public participation for the first time. The data from this initiative is further enhanced with data from the PatentsView database and the Patent Examination Research Database. The study results provide the first empirical evidence that crowdsourcing aids a patent examination process in overcoming the examiner’s local search bias – their over‐reliance on internal knowledge. In particular, it is found that crowdsourcing in patent examination increases examiners’ reliance on atypical and less formalized knowledge. Overall, these findings enable several theoretical and practical recommendations.

Open innovation, in the form of inbound and outbound open innovation, is an ever-increasing research field. Research into outbound open innovation (i.e., the inside-out process) focused mostly on the commercialisation of internal knowledge. However, we know very little about firms’ voluntary nonpecuniary knowledge disclosure. This paper sheds light on this understudied research field by conducting a quantitative study that identifies which internal and external conditions foster firms’ knowledge disclosures. The results show that firms’ strategies to influence (i) the market and the competition and (ii) external spillovers are drivers of firms’ knowledge disclosures. Further, the moderating roles of environmental characteristics are shown. Firms’ environmental technological dynamism is found to strengthen the positive relationships between influencing external spillovers and knowledge disclosure. In contrast, the relationships between influencing the market and the competition and knowledge disclosure are negatively moderated by a firm’s environmental technological dynamism.

This article addresses the importance of tailoring publications to expectations of the intended scientific sub-community it addresses. But what does this mean when writing an article and adopting community specific jargon? This article disentangles the effects of articles’ language complexity on their impact. In the domain of entrepreneurship science, we show that language uniqueness (in form of aligning jargon uniquely to one community) has a positive effect on article’s impact. An article’s novelty (in form of novel recombination of community jargon) has an inverted U-shape relationship with impact. We further show that the optimal level of novelty decreases with increasing uniqueness, yielding higher overall impact. These findings have implications not only for authors of scientific articles but also for their audience.

Recently, scholars are confronted with only small positive, non-existing, or even negative average effects of entrepreneurship education. We draw on two largely neglected and hidden effects of entrepreneurship education, namely the alignment and the sorting effect, in order to explain previous inconsistent evaluation outcomes. Making use of ex ante and ex post student-surveys in a quasi-experimental setting, we provide insights into how these effects emerge and are further amplified by course-induced updates in personal attitudes and perceived behavioral control. Our study shows that relying on average measures is often not effective in evaluating entrepreneurship courses and highlights the need for new outcomes measures.