Knowledge that Transforms

The European higher education landscape has become increasingly integrated causing competition among universities that is no longer bound to national borders. In view of this development, the present paper investigates the relative efficiency of 450 European universities between 2011 and 2014. The novelty of our approach lies in its extended coverage of university outputs and in the thorough peer-group selection process that accounts for high diversity in subject profiles. More specifically, assignment to peer-groups builds on proximity in subject space to ensure valid comparisons between universities. Exploring potential efficiency drivers, we uncover considerable effect heterogeneity between subject clusters, which is indicative of distinct technologies and calls for carefully designed policy measures. Yet institutional size and the ability to seek external funding are largely identified to be primary efficiency drivers.

This paper addresses, both theoretically and empirically, the sectoral patterns of job creation and job destruction in order to distinguish the alternative effects of embodied vs disembodied technological change operating into a vertically connected economy. Disembodied technological change turns out to positively affect employment dynamics in the "upstream" sectors, while expansionary investment does so in the "downstream" industries. Conversely, the replacement of obsolete capital vintages tends to exert a negative impact on labour demand, although this effect turns out to be statistically less robust.

Innovation rarely happens through the actions of a single person. Innovators source their ideas while interacting with their peers, at different levels and with different intensities. In this paper, we exploit a dataset of disambiguated inventors in European cities to assess the influence of their interactions with co-workers, organizations’ colleagues, and geographically co-located peers, to understand if the different levels of interaction influence their productivity. Following inventors’ productivity over time and adding a large number of fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity, we uncover critical facts, such as the importance of city knowledge stocks for inventors’ productivity, with firm knowledge stocks and network knowledge stocks being of smaller importance. However, when the complexity and quality of knowledge is accounted for, the picture changes upside down and closer interactions (individuals’ co-workers and firms’ colleagues) become way more important.

In this article, I explore innovation and diffusion from social movements as part of the phenomenon of free innovation in households. The article contributes to the literature on household innovation by illustrating how social movement motivations may differ from motivations examined in prior studies focused on self-rewards, as well as examining the implications for free innovations and diffusion patterns in this setting. Social movement innovators are typically motivated by a common cause (such as a quest for a new life order and societal change) and create innovations that address a cause and “system change” rather than individual goals. I identify and define three types of social movement innovation: behavioral, product, and symbolic innovation. The common-cause motivation also creates a new form of diffusion problem that can only be solved through the spread and consumption of new products, behaviors, or techniques by a sufficiently large crowd. Common-cause motivations should thus encourage innovation diffusion, thereby reducing the risk of the diffusion-failure problem usually observed in household innovation research.

Prior research demonstrated that, when a strict evaluation sequence is present in innovation contests, the score of the previously evaluated proposal negatively influences the scoring of a subsequent proposal. In this paper, we expand our understanding of such negative scoring spillovers by analysing a setting where not only the previously evaluated proposal, but all other proposals within the same meeting can potentially contribute to negative scoring spillovers. We rely on a sample of 561 proposals in 53 publicly funded innovation contests, launched within the scope of four regional innovation programs in the Netherlands. We also introduce an alternative methodological approach with peer effects to adequately model and test the existence of negative scoring spillovers in contests where a strict evaluation sequence is absent. We provide evidence that, in such contests, proposals can mutually influence each other and that the magnitude of these spillovers depends on the design of the innovation contest. We also discuss the implications of these findings for the specific literature on innovation contests and the broader literature on evaluation spillovers in decision-making processes.

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Facebook friendships. We use a well-established identification strategy that relies on matching inventor citations with citations from examiners. Moreover, we isolate the specific effect of informal connections, above and beyond formal professional ties (co-inventor networks) and geographic proximity. We identify a significant and robust effect of informal ties on patent citations. Further, we find that the effect of geographic proximity on knowledge flows is entirely explained by informal social ties and professional networks. We also show that the effect of informal social ties on knowledge flows is greater for new entrepreneurs or ‘garage inventors’, for older or ‘forgotten’ patents, and for flows across distant technology fields. It has also become increasingly important over the last two decades.

Research teams are often dispersed across geography and organizational boundaries. While prior work has recognized that dispersed teams face coordination challenges, it is not clear how dispersion affects team process efficiency outcomes, such as the speed with which team efforts come to a resolution. Process efficiency outcomes are important because, if the performance benefits associated with working in dispersed teams have a trade-off cost in terms of efficiency, then the net performance benefits from working in such teams may be seriously diminished or even reversed. Prior work has also tended to focus on successful outcomes, which may lead to deficits in our understanding of coordination challenges in dispersed teams. To better comprehend process efficiency, we examine 5,250 teams that work together in an open standard setting, and where the time to resolution of both successful and failed projects is observable. We find that teams that are organizationally or geographically dispersed are fast at reaching success, but fail more slowly than non-dispersed teams. Our interpretation of these disparate outcomes is that the endogenous processes that make dispersed teams more likely to on average select higher potential projects have a second order effect of making it harder for dispersed teams to abandon failing projects. We argue that slow failure has important implications for research & development efforts given the opportunity cost of tying up resources in research teams.