The trade-off between the ease of knowledge diffusion and the incentives to invest in its generation is one of the main themes of the economics of innovation (see Arrow, 1962). Understanding the outcome resulting from the instance of this trade-off described above is a crucial contribution of our paper and it has important implications for the assessment of the effects of the availability of complementary assets. In particular,we characterize the industry features such that an increase in the availability of complementary assets has positive vs. negative overall effects on generated knowledge, start-up formation, firms' profits, and employees' revenues. Providing such a characterization contributes to a better understanding of the differences between industries in the observed patterns of R&D intensity.