Knowledge that Transforms

Novelty indicators are increasingly important for science policy. This paper challenges the indicators of novelty as an atypical combination of knowledge (Uzzi et al., 2013) and as the first appearance of a knowledge combination (Wang et al., 2017). We exploit a sample of 230,854 articles (1985 - 2005), published on 8 journals of the American Physical Society (APS) and 2.4 million citations to test the indicators using (i) a Configuration Null Model, (ii) an external validation set of articles related to Nobel Prize winning researches and APS Milestones, (iii) a set of established interdisciplinarity indicators, and (iv) the relationship with the articles’ impact. We find that novelty as the first appearance of a knowledge combination captures the key structural properties of the citation network and finds it difficult to tell novel and non-novel articles apart, while novelty as an atypical combination of knowledge overlaps with interdisciplinarity. We suggest that the policy evidence derived from these measures should be reassessed.

We study immigrant entrepreneurship and firm ownership in 2007 and 2012 using the Survey of Business Owners (SBO). The survival and growth of immigrant-owned businesses over time relative to native-founded companies is evaluated by linking the 2007 SBO to the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). We quantify the dependency of the United States as a whole, as well as individual states, on the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs in terms of firm formation and job creation. We describe differences in the types of businesses started by immigrants and the quality of jobs created by their firms. First-generation immigrants create about 25% of new firms in the United States, but this share exceeds 40% in some states. In addition, Asian and Hispanic second-generation immigrants start about 6% of new firms. Immigrant-owned firms, on average, create fewer jobs than native-owned firms, but much of this is explained by the industry and geographic location of the firms. Immigrant-owned firms pay comparable wages, conditional on firm traits, to native-owned firms, but are less likely to offer benefits.

We develop a framework for analyzing the role of public agencies in making high-risk investments along the innovation chain and ask how both the risks of innovation and the rewards can be shared between public and private actors. We build on a new approach to innovation policy, which we call market co-creating and shaping, in which the state is not only fixing markets but actively co-creating them. We also look at the legal institutions that determine (and are determined by) the relationship between public and private actors. Policy measures to institutionalize rewards in a way that promote more equitable public–private partnerships can be understood as attempts to mediate asymmetric power relations, tensions and conflicting views among multiple stakeholders, as well as building a shared notion of the value and legitimacy of the role of the state. We conclude by outlining analytical and policy implications and identifying avenues for future research.

Although teaching is a core mission of universities, we know little about industry's input into universities’ teaching activities. This paper advances research on teaching-focused university–industry collaborations (UICs) by studying the determinants of universities’ participation in these collaborations as well as the impact of teaching-focused UICs on graduates’ employability competencies. We designed a three-staged mixed-methods approach in the context of Indian Higher Education Institutes (HEIs). In the first stage, we conducted nine case studies through 53 interviews with Indian HEIs and their industrial partners to understand what factors facilitate or hinder an HEI to engage in teaching-focused UICs. In the second stage, we tested the influence of these factors on HEIs’ propensity to form teaching-focused UICs using data gathered from the websites of 2,280 Indian HEIs. In the third stage, we studied the impact of these collaborations on graduates’ employability competencies on the subset of 486 HEIs for which data on graduates’ employability competencies are available. Our results show that among institutional factors, location, the academic autonomy of an HEI and government-supported intermediary organizations facilitate HEIs’ participation in teaching-focused UICs, whereas the HEI's public ownership inhibits such collaborations. Among HEI-level factors, we found that an HEI's size, discipline variety, academic embeddedness and industrial embeddedness facilitate its participation in teaching-focused industrial collaborations. Lastly, our results demonstrate that graduates from HEIs collaborating in teaching-focused UICs are able to acquire better employability competencies, particularly domain-specific employability competencies.

Teams performing scientific research are becoming increasingly large and interdisciplinary. While prior work has examined antecedents and performance implications of these trends, it is not clear how size and interdisciplinarity relate to teams’ internal organization, especially the division of labor (DoL) between members. We first develop an organizing framework that integrates three complementary dimensions of DoL: (1) the specialization of individual team members, (2) the distribution of activities across team members, and (3) interdependencies between activities. We then discuss how these aspects of DoL are related to team size and interdisciplinarity and test our hypotheses using author contribution data from over 12,000 scientific articles. We find that team size has a positive relationship with an aggregate measure of DoL, but disaggregated measures show that this relationship holds for some aspects of DoL and not others. We also find that interdisciplinary teams use greater division of labor, although this effect depends on the degree to which interdisciplinarity is intra- versus inter-personal. We conclude by discussing how our conceptual and empirical toolkit may be applied in future research on the drivers and consequences of division of labor in teams.

This work contributes to the literature on innovation systems and, in particular, delivers a thorough analysis on business innovation modes across a range of regional contexts. This analysis refers to the strand of literature on STI (Science and Technology-based Innovation) and DUI innovation modes (Innovation based on learning-by-Doing, learning-by-Using, learning-by-Interacting) that have been intensely debated over the past few years. It is a relevant area of research because it discusses the most effective innovation mode adopted by firms and their regions in the context of increasing global competition. In this scientific area, we inquire whether and how the regional context and its specific technological capabilities produce a differentiated impact of STI and DUI innovation modes on innovation outputs, alongside the nature of innovation outputs. In this respect, this study advances the literature on regional innovation systems that have not been analyzed by other scholarly contributions in this strand who have mostly discussed the differentiated impact of innovation modes across individual countries, industries, and business networks. Based on the large heterogeneity of regions across the European geography, we move beyond the set of individual country studies and develop a thorough analysis based on the Community Innovation Survey (CIS 2014) data from the Eurostat office about EU regions. Empirical evidence based on the application of a multiple treatment model suggests that both regional specificities and the nature of innovation matter. In addition, the DUI innovation mode proves to be often more important than expected for most types of innovation output.

An active debate has centered on the importance of manufacturing for driving innovation in the U.S. economy. This paper offers an alternative framework that focuses on the role of suppliers of goods and services (the “supply chain economy”) in national performance. We identify three conceptual attributes of suppliers that make them important for innovation: they produce specialized inputs; have more downstream linkages with other industries; and benefit especially from co-locating with their customers, creating externalities. Using the 2002 Benchmark Input-Output Accounts, we estimate a new industry categorization that separates supply chain (SC) industries (i.e., those that sell primarily to businesses or government) from business-to-consumer (B2C) industries (i.e., those that sell primarily to consumers). We find that the supply chain economy is a distinct and large segment of the economy that includes primarily service providers. The SC industries, especially traded services, have higher average wages than B2C industries. The supply chain economy also has higher innovative activity as captured by the concentration of the vast majority of STEM jobs (primarily in traded services) and patents (in manufacturing). Finally, we find that employment in the economy has evolved from manufacturing into two distinct types of services (1998–2015): SC Traded Services (with the highest STEM intensity and wages) versus B2C Main Street (with the lowest STEM intensity and wages).

This paper elaborates an empirical analysis of the temporal and geographical distribution of green technology, and on how specific country characteristics enable or thwart environmental inventive activities. Using patent data on 63 countries over the period 1970-2012 we identify key drivers of cross-country diversification and specialization. Our first finding is that countries diversify towards green technologies that are related to their existing competences. Notably, the maturity of the green technology matters more than the level of development of each country. The second main result is that countries move along cumulative paths of specialization, and towards more complex green technologies. Interestingly, the complexity of green technologies is not an obstacle to further specialisation. The latter holds also for developing countries that are most exposed to climate change hazards.

This paper examines the relationship between open innovation (OI) practices (inbound and coupled) and innovation performance in service firms. Specifically, it invokes a dynamic capabilities perspective to propose the differential moderating effects of two forms of reconfiguration capabilities, strategic reconfiguration capability (SRC) and operational reconfiguration capability (ORC), on the focal relationship. Based on a sample of service sector firms drawn from the UK Community Innovation Survey, our analysis shows the positive combinative effects of SRC and coupled OI on radical innovation outcomes and those of ORC and coupled OI on incremental innovation outcomes. The findings of differential moderating effects underscore the need to assess the boundary conditions within which OI positively impacts on innovation outcomes and offer insights to managers on the importance of strategic and operational reconfiguration capabilities for achieving better innovation outcomes from OI practices.

This paper explores the relation between the digitalization of labour processes, the level of routineness of labour tasks and changes in employment in the case of Italy in the period 2011-16. The levels of digitalization and routineness of occupations in more than 500 4-digit ISCO professional groups are measured using data from a unique Italian profession-level survey on skill, tasks and work contents – the INAPP-ISTAT Survey on Italian Occupations (ICP), an O*NET-type dataset. Two digitalization indices are used: a digital use index, measuring the use of computers and e-mail in the workplace, and a digital tasks index, capturing the presence of a set of key digital tasks, such as those related to programming or activities concerning the use of specialized hardware. The same dataset is used to compute a composite routine task intensity index. The descriptive evidence presented in the paper shows strong differences across occupations in the level of digitalization and routineness, and the presence of a negative relation between the two in most professional groups. The econometric estimates show that digital-intensive occupations tend to grow more than the rest of the workforce, particularly when digitalization is measured relying on the digital use indicator. The level of routineness, in turn, is negatively or, in some specifications, not significantly associated to employment change. However, occupations that are both digital and routine-intensive turn out to be penalized in terms of employment growth, providing further support to (and further qualifying) the the routine biased technological change (RBTC) hypothesis. In other words, our results show that the impact of digitalization on employment is mediated by the level of routineness characterizing the tasks bundled in each occupation.