TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - Adam B. Jaffe, Benjamin F. Jones
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0001
[science policy;innovation;Vannevar Bush;endless frontier;science-innovation linkages]
In 1945, Vannevar Bush published Science: The Endless Frontier and thereby established an intellectual architecture that has largely defined public science institutions and policy in the decades since. In this NBER volume, the collaborators consider important dimensions upon which the nature of science and innovation has changed. By identifying critical dimensions of change, the contributions to this volume highlight new issues for policy and assess points of tension with Bush’s initial vision. Collectively, the eleven papers in the volume investigate changes in (1) the organization of scientific research, (2) the geography of innovation, (3) modes of entrepreneurship, and (4) the structure of research institutions and science-innovation linkages. The introductory chapter provides an overview of these contributions and synthesizes key insights regarding these changes and their potential implications for policy. (pages 1 - 14)
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Why and Wherefore of Increased Scientific Collaboration - Richard B. Freeman, Ina Ganguli, Raviv Murciano-Goroff
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0002
[collaboration;teams;economics of science;citations;international;research and development;coauthor networks;biotechnology;nanotechnology;physics]
This chapter examines international and domestic collaborations using an original survey of corresponding authors and Web of Science data of articles that had at least one US coauthor in Particle and Field Physics, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology. The data identify the connections among coauthors and the views of corresponding authors about the collaboration. Collaborations have found to have increased across US cities and between US researchers and researchers abroad. However, they show sufficient similarity to indicate that collaborations are best viewed in many regards as occurring across space broadly rather than in terms of international vs. domestic collaborative activity. The main reason scientists give for collaborations to combine the specialized knowledge and skills of coauthors is also documented. The vast majority report that face-to-face meetings are important; most collaborators first met working in the same institution and communicate often through meetings with coauthors from distant locations. Finally, for biotech, it is found that citations to international papers are higher compared to papers with domestic collaborators only, but not for the other two fields. Moreover, in all three fields, papers with the same number of coauthors had lower citations if they were international collaborations. (pages 17 - 48)
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The (Changing) Knowledge Production Function: Evidence from the MIT Department of Biology for 1970?2000 - Annamaria Conti, Christopher C. Liu
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0003
[knowledge frontier;laboratory composition;scientific productivity;university science;graduate training;postdoctoral training]
Considerable attention has been focused, in recent years, on the role that graduate and postdoc students play in the production of academic knowledge. Using data from the MIT Department of Biology for the period 1970-2000, the changes over time of four fundamental aspects of their productivity are analyzed: i) training duration; ii) time to a first publication; iii) productivity over the training period; and iv) collaboration patterns with other scientists. Four main trends that are common to graduate students and postdocs are identified. First, training periods have increased for later cohorts of graduate and postdoc students. Second, later cohorts tend to publish their initial first-author article later than the earlier cohorts. Third, they produce fewer first-author publications. Finally, collaborations with other scientists, as measured by the number of coauthors on a paper, have increased. This increase is driven by collaborations with scientists external to a trainee’s laboratory. These results can be interpreted in light of the following two paradigms: the increased burden of knowledge that later generations of scientists face and the limited availability of permanent academic positions. (pages 49 - 74)
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Collaboration, Stars, and the Changing Organization of Science: Evidence from Evolutionary Biology - Ajay Agrawal, John McHale, Alexander Oettl
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0004
[collaboration;stars;burden of knowledge;communication;internet;agglomeration]
The concentration of research output is declining at the department level but increasing at the individual level. In evolutionary biology, from 1980 to 2000, the fraction of citation-weighted publications produced by the top 20% of departments falls from approximately 75% to 60% but rises for the top 20% of individual scientists from 70% to 80%. This may be due to changing patterns of collaboration, perhaps caused by the rising burden of knowledge and the falling cost of communication, which increase the returns to collaboration. The propensity to collaborate is found to be rising over time and the nature of collaboration is changing. The geographic distance and the difference in institution rank between collaborators is increasing. The relative size of the pool of potential distant collaborators for star versus non-star scientists is rising. This chapter develops a simple model based on star advantage in terms of opportunities for collaboration that provides a unified explanation for these facts. Finally, considering the effect of individual location decisions of stars on the overall distribution of human capital, this chapter speculates on the efficiency of the emerging distribution of scientific activity, given the localized externalities generated by stars and the increasing returns to distant collaboration. (pages 75 - 106)
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Credit History: The Changing Nature of Scientific Credit - Joshua S. Gans, Fiona Murray
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0005
[credit;rewards;citation;coauthorship;Matthew effect]
This paper considers the role of the allocation of scientific credit in determining the organization of science. This chapter examines changes in that organization and the nature of credit allocation in the past half century. The chapter contributes a formal model of that organizational choice that considers scientist decisions to integrate, collaborate or publish and how credit could be allocated to foster efficient outcomes. First, initial focus is on the economic and sociological perspectives on the nature of scientific credit. Then, perspectives are developed on the core organizational choices made by scientists as a way of motivating the central importance of scientific credit in the ways in which knowledge production is organized. Finally, this chapter presents the “credit history” – how the institutions and norms of scientific credit have changed over the past fifty years. This is done by exploring three debates that have animated the scientific community over the past fifty years. Building on the qualitative insights from the past fifty years, this chapter lays out a formal model that places credit allocation alongside the changing technical costs and knowledge burden of research to explore the relative importance of these three factors. (pages 107 - 132)
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The Rise of International Coinvention - Lee Branstetter, Guangwei Li, Francisco Veloso
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0006
[coinvention;patenting;multinational research and development;international collaboration;India;China]
The rapid rise of India and China as innovating nations seems to contradict conventional views of the economic growth and development process. India and China are still at the early stages of development, yet advanced nations are granting rapidly growing numbers of patents to inventors based in these countries. This chapter’s analysis of U.S. patents shows that a majority of these patents are granted to local inventor teams working for foreign multinationals. An important fraction of these patents incorporate direct intellectual inputs from researchers outside India or China, a trend that characterized as "international co-invention." As such, the international patenting surge of India and China does not represent a challenge to traditional models of growth and development, so much as it represents a move toward an expanded international division of labor within global R&D networks. This chapter explores these issues with a focus on multinational R&D in India. (pages 135 - 168)
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Information Technology and the Distribution of Inventive Activity - Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, Shane Greenstein
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0007
[patenting;invention;convergence;divergence;information technology;internet]
This chapter examines the relationship between the diffusion of advanced internet technology and the geographic concentration of invention, as measured by patents. First, this chapter shows that patenting became more concentrated from the early 1990s to the early 2000s and, similarly, that counties that were leaders in patenting in the early 1990s produced relatively more patents by the early 2000s. Second, this chapter compares the extent of invention in counties that were leaders in internet adoption to those that were not. There is little difference in the growth rate of patenting between leaders and laggards in internet adoption, on average. However, it is found that the rate of patent growth was faster among counties who were not leaders in patenting in the early 1990s but were leaders in internet adoption by 2000, suggesting that the internet helped stem the trend towards more geographic concentration. This chapter shows that these results are largely driven by patents filed by distant collaborators rather than non-collaborative patents or patents by non-distant collaborators, suggesting low cost long-distance digital communication as a potential mechanism. (pages 169 - 196)
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Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy - Ramana Nanda, Ken Younge, Lee Fleming
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0008
[renewable energy;innovation;venture capital]
This chapter documents three facts related to innovation and entrepreneurship in renewable energy. Using data from the US Patent and Trademark Office, it is first shown that patenting in renewable energy remains highly concentrated in a few large energy firms. In 2009, the top 20% firms accounted for over 40% of renewable energy patents in our data. Second, we compare patenting by venture capital-backed startups and incumbent firms. Using a variety of measures, it is found that VC-backed startups are engaged in more novel and more highly cited innovations, compared to incumbent firms. Incumbent firms also have a higher share of patents that are completely un-cited or self-cited, suggesting that incumbents are more likely to engage in incremental innovation compared to VC-backed startups. Third, the chapter documents a rising share of patenting by startups that coincided with the surge in venture capital finance for renewable energy technologies in the early 2000s. This chapter also points to structural factors about renewable energy that have led the availability of venture capital finance for renewable energy to fall dramatically in recent years, with potential implications for the rate and trajectory of innovation in this sector. (pages 199 - 232)
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Economic Value Creation in Mobile Applications - Timothy F. Bresnahan, Jason P. Davis, Pai-Ling Yin
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0009
[platforms;mobile;entrepreneurship;innovation;information and communications technology;monetization;industry evolution;technology;diffusion;apps;ICT]
New mobile development platforms are a 21st-century growth pole. By successfully recombining existing information technologies with new innovations, they have spurred a positive feedback loop of consumer adoption of mobile devices and firm entry into a wide variety of applications, or “apps.” Despite its tremendous size, the industry is still at an early stage, with rapid growth and a wide variety of economic experiments exploring how this new industry will create economic value. Because there are numerous and growing app markets, the industry needs economic institutions to support market experimentation. However, the volume and diversity of app product entry has created problems for marketing and commercialization, especially matching consumers to products. This early pattern is like many earlier information and communications technology industries in that it shows a pattern of technical success but commercialization struggles. However, several important new issues arise, including a bias against entrepreneurial commercialization, and the importance of end-user demand in determining market evolution. We consider how this situation has impacted the industry’s task of discovering economic value and choosing among different app and platform features to make its ultimate contribution to economic growth. We also consider the likely market and institutional responses to the current bottleneck. (pages 233 - 286)
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State Science Policy Experiments - Maryann Feldman, Lauren Lanahan
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0010
[state policy;higher education;university research and development;innovation policy;policy adoption]
Over the past 30 years, the 50 state governments have experimented with different programs that attempt to leverage academic science to create economic growth. Three broadly diffuse programs are: Eminent Scholars, which attracts scientific talent; Centers of Excellence, which builds research expertise that involves industry; and University Research Grants, which provides funding for research projects. This chapter traces their adoption and estimates the relationship with economic, political and R&D-related conditions for each program. The results indicate that states, in part, use these policy levers to enhance the performance of their R&D capacity workforce and to substitute declines in national trends of extramural funding of research and development. Viewing Eminent Scholars and the University Research Grants as more upstream programs, the authors find that state commitment relies on the strength of the state's R&D capacity and demonstrated commitment to science. Bycontrast, state adoption of the Centers of Excellence program, which is more downstream, has broader appeal, which is likely due to its design of producing more immediate economic outcomes. (pages 287 - 318)
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The Endless Frontier: Reaping What Bush Sowed? - Paula Stephan
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0011
[research universities;funding for research;peer review;PhD production;indirect costs;basic research]
This chapter examines and documents how the Endless Frontier changed the research landscape at universities and how universities responded to the initiative. I show that the agencies it established and funded initially recruited research proposals from faculty and applications from students for fellowships and scholarships. By the 1960s, universities began to push for more resources from the federal government for research, support for faculty salary and research assistants and higher indirect costs. The process transformed the relationship between universities and federal funders; it also transformed the relationship between universities and faculty. The university research system that has grown and evolved faces a number of challenges that threaten the health of universities and the research enterprise and have implications for discovery and innovation. Five are discussed in the closing section. They are (1) a proclivity on the part of faculty and funding agencies to be risk averse; (2) the tendency to produce more PhDs than the market for research positions demands; (3) a heavy concentration of research in the biomedical sciences; (4) a continued expansion on the part of universities that may place universities at increased financial risk and (5) a flat or declining amount of federal funds for research. (pages 321 - 370)
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Algorithms and the Changing Frontier - Hezekiah Agwara, Philip Auerswald, Brian Higginbotham
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286860.003.0012
[algorithms;globalization;innovation;interoperability;information and communications technology;ICT;International Standards Organization;ISO;production recipes;supply chains]
The notion of the “frontier” has changed from being a geographical one, to one that delineates the pursuit and production of scientific knowledge. We first summarize the dominant interpretations of the “frontier” in the United States and predecessor colonies over the past 400 years: agricultural (1610s-1880s), industrial (1890s-1930s), scientific (1940s-1980s), and algorithmic (1990s-present). We describe the difference between the algorithmic frontier and the scientific frontier. We then propose that the recent phenomenon referred to as “globalization” is actually better understood as the progression of the algorithmic frontier, as enabled by standards that in turn have facilitated the interoperability of firm-level production algorithms. We conclude by describing implications of the advance of the algorithmic frontier for scientific discovery and technological innovation. (pages 371 - 414)
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