The Excitement of Something New

These couple of months I had to come up with an idea for a third essay of my dissertation. While aiming for something very different and more micro oriented, I still wanted to keep the focus of my thesis on the international aspects of innovation and technology transfer and especially on developing countries. And yes, after a couple of weeks and meetings with my advisor, I am happy to say that I found something nice. The basic idea is to look at alliances in the global the tire industry between different firms and see who is providing technology, to whom and why. There are about 350 firms globally, all producing tires in various countries of the world. Every year about 50 to 70 such technological agreements occur usually between firms from developed and developing countries, but not always.Moreover, the tire industry, although a mature one, has a good pace of technological innovation and high competition, which make it even more interesting.