Knowledge that Transforms

We show that culture affects individuals’ participation in science. Using Scopus data on 3.7 million scientists worldwide, we document that women’s representation in science varies across fields and across countries, even within a field. Women’s representation in both STEM and Non-STEM fields is higher in more gender-equal countries and countries with greater academic freedom. Women’s representation is higher in fields with more inclusive cultures. We provide evidence for two channels through which culture affects representation: migration and productivity. For example, female scientists’ location choices appear to be more sensitive to country culture than those of male scientists. Our results highlight that individuals’ careers in science depend on social factors. Thus, a country’s capacity to engage in scientific research — critical for innovation and economic growth — also hinges on social factors. • Gender-equality, not math gaps, predicts women’s STEM and non-STEM representation. • Women’s representation in science is correlated with academic freedom. • Women avoid less inclusive scientific fields when they have greater freedom. • Female scientists migrate to more gender-equal countries. • The “productivity gap” is lower in gender-equal countries.

Using firm-level data from 41 countries, this study investigates how resource-constrained firms can strengthen their resilience to resist the COVID-19 crisis through non-R&D induced innovation. The empirical results show that firms in Middle- and Low-income countries, where access to government aid is often constrained, can enhance their survival prospects by internally upgrading their learning and adaptive capabilities. Specifically, non-R&D induced innovation can effectively substitute for insufficient government financial support by enabling firms to adjust operations and maintain competitiveness during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings emphasise the importance of jointly considering government support and innovation in firm survival analyses, as omitting either factor may introduce potential omitted variable bias. To address this, supervised learning approaches are employed to predict whether firms that exited had received government support prior to closure. In addition, this study advances the literature by uncovering the complementary roles of innovation and government financial interventions, and highlights context-specific strategies that policymakers should adopt to improve firm resilience amid external shocks. • During crisis, non-R&D innovation boosts survival when government support is limited • Government support enhances survival, but its synergy with innovation varies • Including government support and innovation avoids bias in COVID-19 survival studies • Policies should prioritise adaptive, incremental innovation suited to income contexts

Positions of intermediate network centrality have been found to be advantageous for creativity. Extending this line of work, we suggest that the potential benefits of positions of varying degrees of network centrality depend on the underlying approach to innovation. Using qualitative data from the board game industry, we first contrast the properties of two innovation approaches, a traditional, firm-internal approach versus a crowdfunding approach. Adopting an opportunity realization logic, we advance the idea that positions of intermediate network centrality enhance creativity when accompanied by a more traditional approach to innovation, but that positions at either the core or the periphery of the network aid creativity when creators employ a crowdfunding approach to innovation. We test our arguments in a sample of 6863 board games that were developed and realized either in the traditional way or using crowdfunding. Our results confirm that the value of network positions hinges upon the underlying innovation approach and highlight the implications of crowdfunding for creativity. • We highlight the unique structural properties of crowdfunding as a distinct approach to innovation. • Crowdfunding serves a key contingency, steering idea generation and realization. • Traditional versus crowdfunding approaches to innovation shape the value of network positions to produce creative outcomes.

Understanding how structural change drives long-run growth requires jointly considering the dynamics of productive and scientific specialisations, and science–industry alignment. This paper develops and tests a unified framework that integrates evolutionary, structuralist, complexity, and innovation-systems perspectives to assess how productive and scientific specialisations, science-industry alignment, diversification, and global value chain integration shape economic performance. To operationalize this framework, we construct new indicators, including a Science–Industry Matching (SIM) index, measures of dynamic entry and relatedness density, and specialisation-based diversity indices, and apply them to a panel of up to 142 countries over 2000–2018/2023. Estimation relies on country fixed effects with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors to address heteroskedasticity, autocorrelation, and cross-sectional dependence. The results reveal that persistent specialisation in high- and medium-high-tech industries fosters growth, while low-tech dependence constrains it. Scientific specialisation in enabling fields such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and energy/environmental sciences supports growth, but excessive concentration risks lock-in. Science–industry alignment enhances growth in advanced economies with strong absorptive capacity but penalises weaker systems. Industrial diversification often dilutes resources, whereas scientific diversification consistently promotes growth by broadening the knowledge base for recombination. Finally, integration into global value chains is growth-enhancing in developing economies, while advanced economies can sustain higher domestic value added without significant penalties. • New indicators capture specialisation, diversification, and science–industry alignment. • Persistent high- and mid-tech specialisation fosters growth, low-tech dependence hinders it. • Scientific diversification promotes growth, industrial diversification often dilutes it. • Science–industry alignment benefits advanced economies but penalises weaker ones. • GVC integration supports growth in developing economies, less critical for advanced ones.

Technical standards have gained increased importance in supporting technological innovation. Within the standardization process, standard-setting organizations (SSOs) build upon scientific and technological knowledge. Consequently, scientific publications can be referenced in a standard. These standard-relevant publications (SR-pubs) remain under-researched thus far, as the literature mainly focuses on standard-essential patents (SEPs). Besides providing some basic patterns regarding SR-pubs, we focus our analyses on the citation patterns of these standard-relevant publications. We hypothesize that a) SR-pubs are more highly cited than the average publication and b) that this is, on the one hand, due to a selection effect, i.e., more highly cited publications are more likely to be referenced in the standard from the start, but on the other hand due to a “reputation effect,” i.e., being referenced in a standard further increases the citation rates of a paper due to a boost in visibility. We test our assumptions using a dynamic difference-in-difference (DID) estimator on a sample of 6754 unique, standard-relevant publications cited in standards published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and a control group that is ten times the size. The results show that SR-pubs are more highly cited than the average publication from the control group. We further find evidence for a strong selection effect, particularly for publications that have already been highly cited before being referenced in a standard. We can also confirm the reputation effect, albeit on a smaller scale than the selection effect, especially for publications that have previously been lowly cited before being referenced in a standard. • Standard-relevant publications receive significantly more citations than average papers • The selection effect drives high citation rates of standard-referenced papers • We can also confirm the reputation effect, albeit on a smaller scale than the selection effect

International joint patent applications, a means of legal protection for co-developed technologies by firms from different countries, are being affected by the emerging digital trade rules. We use data on firms' joint patent applications with foreign partners from the Bureau van Dijk Orbis Intellectual Property database to investigate the impact of digital trade rules on international joint patent applications at the firm level. Our empirical result suggests that digital trade rules included within preferential trade agreements significantly promote local firms' international joint patent applications. This result holds after a series of endogeneity tests and robustness checks. In addition, we find that the promotion effect is heterogeneous across the types of provisions, the digital intensity of sectors, the geographical contiguity between countries and the types of collaboration entities. Moreover, we demonstrate that digital trade rules promote firms' international joint patent applications through a critical mechanism that digital regulatory differences between countries are reduced. Furthermore, we find that digital trade rules increase the breadth, depth, and quality of firms' international joint patent applications. Overall, our study enriches the understanding of the effects of digital trade rules and sheds light on the factors that influence firms' international joint patent applications. • Digital trade rules promote firms' international joint patent applications. • The promotion effect is heterogeneous across the digital intensity of sectors. • They increase the breadth and depth of international joint patent applications.

Corporate ideation systems are increasingly used to harness employee creativity for innovation. Within these systems, serial ideators play a central role by consistently supplying new ideas. While prior research has emphasized the benefits of past success in fostering future innovation, it often treats all successes as functionally equivalent. In this study, we adopt a more nuanced perspective by distinguishing between ordinary and extreme success, and theorize that extreme success, but not ordinary success, undermines innovation outcomes. Drawing on a four-year archival dataset encompassing 1145 ideas submitted by 236 serial ideators within the internal ideation system of a global automotive firm, we find that past extreme success significantly reduces the likelihood of subsequent idea implementation. We further demonstrate that this effect is driven by two mediating mechanisms: (i) reduced team idea development and (ii) inflated self-perceived social status. In two follow-up experiments, we provide causal evidence that extreme success influences the two mediators. Together, our research advances prior work by conceptually and empirically distinguishing between ordinary and extreme success in ideation systems and uncovering the specific mechanisms through which extreme success, unlike ordinary success, can hinder subsequent innovation outcomes. We discuss several implications for managers seeking to foster sustained employee creativity and innovation through digital ideation. • Extreme success—unlike ordinary success—is negatively associated with subsequent idea implementation through two main mechanisms. • Extreme success reduces the likelihood of ideators developing ideas in a team, which in turn is associated with lower idea implementation. • Extreme success increases an ideator's perceived social status, which in turn is associated with lower idea implementation.

The production of knowledge has become increasingly a global endeavor. Yet, location related factors, such as local working environment and national policy designs, may continue to affect what kind of science is being pursued. Here we examine the geography of the production of creative science by country, through the lens of novelty and atypicality proposed in Uzzi et al. (2013). We quantify a country's representativeness in novel and atypical science, finding persistent differences in propensity to generate creative works, even among developed countries that are large producers in science. We further cluster countries based on how their tendency to publish novel science changes over time, identifying one group of emerging countries. Our analyses point out the recent emergence of China not only as a large producer in science but also as a leader that disproportionately produces more novel and atypical research. Discipline specific analysis indicates that China's over-production of atypical science is limited to a few disciplines, especially its most prolific ones like materials science and chemistry.

The rapid spread of digital technologies has led traditional banks, long-standing pillars of the financial sector, to embrace digital innovation. This study investigates how digital innovation influences bank risk. We develop a new hand-collected index that captures five dimensions of digital innovation, namely volume, quality, agency, generativity, and convergence. Using a panel of 391 Chinese commercial banks from 2009 to 2018, we find that banks with higher levels of digital innovation tend to engage in less excessive risk-taking. This negative relationship is robust across multiple identification strategies, including difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, Heckman two-stage estimation, and change-on-change regressions, which address concerns of endogeneity. Two mechanisms explain this effect. First, digital innovation strengthens market discipline by improving bank transparency. Second, it enhances market power by improving loan quality and reducing information asymmetries between banks and borrowers. The bank stabilizing effect also varies across different dimensions and strategic goals of digital innovation. In addition, the risk-reducing effect is more pronounced for banks located in provinces with greater digital innovation by other financial service providers, for non–state-owned banks, for banks lacking national geographic reach, and for those in provinces with stronger legal enforcement or more developed credit markets. These findings highlight the strategic role of digital innovation in shaping bank risk and provide important implications for managers, regulators, and other stakeholders concerned with financial stability.

This research examines how time zone differences among co-authors of peer-reviewed articles influence citations. The analysis reveals that articles with authors spanning wider time zones receive more citations, even after controlling for physical distance, the number of co-authors, the number of countries, time since publication, journal-specific factors, and in some specifications also co-author team specific factors with fixed effects. Specifically, a one-hour increase in the average time zone difference between authors is associated with a 4% increase in citations compared to the sample mean. The relationship exhibits an inverted U-shape, where a time zone difference of 5 to 6 h, which allows for sufficient overlap, yields the highest positive coefficient (about 15% increase in citations). Field specific results indicate that one potential mechanism through which time zone differences can improve publication outcome is by facilitating faster collaboration and accelerating research outcomes.