Essays on the Politics of Innovation

Abstract

The innovation literature has noted that political factors are an important class of determinants for firms’ new technologies (Teece, 1986; Tushman and Rosenkopf, 1992; Ahuja et al., 2013). Accordingly, recent studies have documented the impact of different policies on innovation outcomes (e.g., Arora et al., 2021; Marx et al., 2009; Balsmeier et al., 2017). The works from this stream of literature have mostly studied changes in the regulatory environment which are understood to be exogenous and discontinuous. However, the literature’s focus on this specific type of policy change may be overlooking other political dynamics also important for new technologies. In particular, prior literature suggests that some regulations have a tendency to evolve at a more continuous pace (Hargadon and Douglas, 2001; Weber et al., 2008; Sine and Lee, 2009; Navis and Glynn, 2010), and that firms’ political landscapes can develop endogenously at times (Hillman and Hitt, 1999; Dorobantu et al., 2017; Funk and Hirschman, 2017). Therefore, in this dissertation, I explore how changes in the regulatory environment that are more incremental but commonly-observed can impact the innovation output of firms, and how firms’ attempts to directly shape regulations influence new technologies.