Knowledge that Transforms

Paludiculture is the productive use of wet and rewetted peatlands. A major motivation is climate change, because drained peatlands contribute significant amounts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The study presents an analysis of paludiculture as a critical sustainability innovation mission in the making. It is based on qualitative interviews conducted in 2018 in the north-east of Germany as well as on subsequent regional and European level stakeholder workshops focused on wet agriculture options for rewetted mires and other types of wetlands. A social grid approach of cognitive frames, institutions and social networks and their interplay is used to analyse paludiculture options for currently drained mires. The analysis suggests a pathway of paludiculture as land use at the margins of intensive, dryland agriculture. It also points to strategies for paludiculture to move from the margin to a transformation pathway, based on the use of framing, institutional conversion and productive niche work. The study proposes a 3Ms-schema of mission, modes and making innovation as a device to create space for a wide and inclusive discussion of paludiculture.

Supply-side economists made numerous pleas for removing labour market rigidities through ‘structural reforms’. From a Schumpeterian viewpoint, however, one can argue that labour market rigidities create useful incentives for innovation. Our estimates on German panel data (2007–2015) support the Schumpeterian view. Using the taxonomy of industries by Peneder (2010) we find that evidence of the Schumpeterian view is particularly strong in R&D intensive manufacturing industries, as well as in service industries with high degrees of cumulativeness of knowledge. Evidence of the Schumpeterian view is weaker in low-technology industries and in start-ups when firms rely more on generally available knowledge rather than on firm-specific and tacit knowledge accumulated in the past.

This paper explores the nature and impact of research misconduct in psychology by analyzing 160 articles that were retracted from prominent scholarly journals between 1998 and 2017. We compare findings with recent studies of retracted papers in economics, and business and management, to profile practices that are likely to be problematic in cognate social science disciplines. In psychology, the principal reason for retraction was data fabrication. Retractions took longer to make, and generally were from higher ranked and more prestigious journals, than in the two cognate disciplines. We recommend that journal editors should be more forthcoming in the reasons they provide for article retractions. We also recommend that the discipline of psychology gives a greater priority to the publication of replication studies; initiates a debate about how to respond to failed replications; adopts a more critical attitude to the importance of attaining statistical significance; discourages p-hacking and Hypothesizing After Results are Known (HARKing); assesses the long-term effects of pre-registering research; and supports stronger procedures to attest to the authenticity of data in research papers. Our contribution locates these issues in the context of a growing crisis of confidence in the value of social science research. We also challenge individual researchers to reassert the primacy of disinterested academic inquiry above pressures that can lead to an erosion of scholarly integrity.

University mergers fundamentally aim to enhance the level of higher education and scientific research performance through resource integration by “reorganization”. However, whether university mergers achieve the latter goal has been subject to controversy. With the help of the “quasi-experiment” of Chinese colleges and universities merged in the 1990s, this study determines the impact of university mergers on scientific research performance. Panel data of 431 colleges and universities from 1993 to 2013 in The compilation of scientific and technical statistics of Chinese higher education and difference in differences method are used. Results show that the merger of colleges and universities exert a significant negative impact on the scientific research performance due to excessive government interventions and difficulties in cultural integration. The merger effect is related to the number of university participants and degree of government intervention. Therefore, university mergers cannot effectively promote the level of scientific research, unable to bring economies of scale and rather lead to diseconomies of scale.

This work identifies and studies the determinants of trademark value. In particular, it focuses on trademark characteristics that are related to the underlying brand and on legally stipulated characteristics. To reveal the value implications of the identified trademark characteristics, it follows the idea that more valuable trademarks tend to be protected for a longer period than less valuable trademarks, provided that the benefits of this protection exceed its costs. Thus, those characteristics that have a positive association with the duration of trademark protection should indicate more valuable trademarks. The empirical analysis relies on studying trademark activities in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, largely owing to its heavy reliance on product differentiation to compete in the market. The results suggest that trademark characteristics are an important predictor of trademark value. At the same time, the value interpretation of some characteristics depends on the stage of the trademark protection lifecycle (that is, registration, maintenance, or renewal) under consideration.

This paper posits that the combination of changes in a forerunner's industry legitimacy and a latecomer's efforts to endogenise windows of opportunity allows the latecomer to evolve from a turnkey importer to a global exporter. Our theoretical assertions are supported by analysing Korea as a latecomer in the nuclear power industry. We show that both an increase and a decrease in a forerunner's industry legitimacy provides exogenous windows of opportunity for the latecomer to access a forerunner's knowledge base. In particular, the decrease in a forerunner's industry legitimacy provides a critical opportunity for the latecomer to acquire core technology. In addition, our analysis shows some interesting findings on the latecomer's endogenisation of windows of opportunity through the lens of technological innovation systems. This study advances a more fine-grained view on catch-up theory by shedding new light on the implications of transnational industry legitimacy dynamics and windows of opportunity for a latecomer's catch-up in complex product systems.

We introduce, validate, and make publicly available a new data source for innovation research: scientific references in patent specifications. These references are common and algorithmically extractable. Critically, they are very different from the “front page” prior art commonly used to proxy for inventor knowledge. Only 24% of front page citations to academic articles are in the patent text, and 31% of in-text citations are on the front page. We explain these differences by describing the legal rules and practice governing citation. Empirical validations suggest that in-text citations are qualitatively different. Further, there is suggestive evidence that they more accurately proxy for knowledge flows, consistent with their legal role.