Overview
Aims, objectives and results
In this project, funded by the COE grant to ITEC, Doshisha University, Simon Deakin and Andrea Mina carried out a review and synthesis of the link between corporate governance and innovation. Innovation has been identified as an engine of growth in different areas of research in economics, business and management and its positive effects have been theorised and observed at different levels of aggregation. Many gaps in the literature remain on the finer mechanisms through which specific institutional arrangements influence and are influenced by innovation and the policy and business challenge of aligning the legal framework and the needs of innovation-driven growth. In the field of law and economics, a growing body of work is looking at the relationship between firm-level corporate governance arrangements and the institutional framework at the level of company and employment law. The legal origins hypothesis maintains that the legal infrastructure of a given country – its constitution, its court system, the nature of its legislature, and the structure of the legal professions – shapes the content of its laws on, among other things, corporate governance, with consequences for economic development. The connection between the two debates – innovation on the one hand, and corporate governance on the other – has remained under-researched relative to other aspects of the broad legal framework that constrains and enables firm behaviour (for example, in comparison with intellectual property rights). In their synthesis paper, Deakin and Mina review the theory and evidence of the interaction between corporate governance and innovation, develop a specific set of hypotheses, illustrate how they can be addressed, and suggest avenues for further research which can significantly enrich the current debate on the knowledge (or ‘learning’) economy. The work was completed in 2011 and will be published later in 2012 as a contribution to a volume of papers on law and innovation.
Project leader
- Simon Deakin
- Andrea Mina
Research assistants
- Mabel Brodrick-Okereke
- Ola Polanska
Project dates
2010-2011
Funding
Japanese Ministry of Education COE grant to ITEC, Doshisha University, and the CBR
Output
Book chapters
Deakin, S. and A. Mina (2013) ‘Institutions and innovation: is corporate governance the missing link?’ in M. Pittard, A. Monotti and J. Duns (eds.) Business Innovation: A Legal Balancing Act – Perspectives from Intellectual Property, Labour and Employment, Competition and Corporate Laws, pp. 456-482 (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar).