Recent migratory shocks call for in-depth, structured studies of both the benefits and drawbacks of these phenomena. Using records from the European Patent Office, this paper documents the influence of Soviet inventors that migrated to Germany following the collapse of the Soviet Union on the patent production of local inventors. The evidence points to an increase in patent production in the technology fields in which the Soviet Union was most active, and a tendency for local inventors who had directly collaborated with their Soviet counterparts to explore new technology domains.
We examine the impact of a grant program promoting international mobility on researchers’ scientific outcomes and careers. To provide causal evidence, we exploit unique data from the Swiss National Foundation and implement a Regression Discontinuity Design analysis. We find that the grant effectively supports periods of research abroad that often extend beyond the duration of the grant, without increasing the probability of permanent migration. Awarded researchers increase their output quality, although the effect on output quantity and careers is not significant. Additional evidence suggests that financing international mobility likely affects output quality by reducing the cost of exploring new collaboration opportunities and research topics: awarded applicants are more likely to collaborate with new coauthors of higher, on average, scientific quality and rely less on their previous own research results. Moreover, the grants mainly benefit researchers receiving a mobility grant for the first time.
This paper studies the effect of extramural R&D and of scientific knowledge in the creation of high novelty innovations. We first argue that extramural R&D brings in higher benefits, but also higher costs, when trying to obtain high novelty vs. low novelty innovations. Second, we propose that extramural investments in scientific R&D allow the firm to access distant knowledge and to break the path dependence induced by its resource endowments. However, investments in scientific R&D are also subject to the risks of the ‘two worlds’ that result from the collaboration of firms and universities and research centres. Our hypotheses are tested with data from the Panel of Technological Innovation, which describes the innovative activities of Spanish firms from 2005 to 2013. Our results show an inverted U-shaped relationship between extramural R&D and the share of sales from new products. They also reveal that extramural R&D investments increase the proportion of sales from high novelty products more than from low novelty products (a 21% vs. a 2%). However, an excessive reliance on extramural R&D reduces more the sales from high novelty innovations than from low novelty innovations (a 52% vs. a 32%). Finally, extramural R&D performed by universities and research centres raises the share of sales from high novelty innovations. However, collaboration with non-scientific sources is more impactful than collaboration with scientific ones, no matter the nature of the innovation considered.
Inventing is a recombinant process that involves searching and recombining differ- ent streams of knowledge. The value of invention is associated with not only how many prior inventions are considered, but also how they are related to each other. We introduce social network analysis broadly used in the social capital theory, and extend the dimension of analysis for the evaluation of patent value. This study em- ploys U.S. pharmaceutical patent data and investigates whether the network charac- teristic of backward citations have significant effect on the future patent value. The empirical results suggest that the network features of backward citations measured by cohesion, constraint, and efficiency have statistically significant implication on the value of invention in both level and depreciation rate. The study also provides empirical evidence that the exploration strategy is more significantly and positively correlated with the future value of invention compared to the exploitation strategy of inventors.
This article traces the trajectory of biotechnology firms, clusters and collaborations in Australia between 2003 and 2014. Combining descriptive analyses, network visualizations and statistical modelling of longitudinal data collected from multiple sources, we investigate Australian firms’ ability to overcome the three challenges characterizing biotechnology: first, accessing new knowledge and intellectual property; second, raising early-stage funding for timely product development; and third, bringing products to market. Like biotechnology firms worldwide, Australian firms adopt a network approach to success, relying on different types of collaborative ties with diverse partners to access complementary resources and facilitate learning and innovation. The aspiration here is a virtuous cycle, where networks promote innovation and innovation promotes networks, as occurs in the world superclusters. In contrast, our analyses show that the collaborations of Australian biotechnology firms produce not so much a virtuous cycle, as a dead end. Specifically, local collaborations with public research organizations generate network effects in meeting the challenges of new knowledge and early-stage funding, but do not extend to the challenge of bringing products to market. We link this 'network failure' to the limitations of public research organizations as anchor tenants with the capability to catalyze collaborations with distant partner organizations directed towards commercialization, in particular giant multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Our study enriches the substantial literature on networked innovation, which is biased towards celebrating the benefits of networks and collaborations for innovation and performance, particularly in biotechnology.
The relationship between national regulation and job creation remains highly debated. The “public choice” perspective holds that regulation hinders job creation through compliance costs and regulatory capture. Meanwhile, the “public interest” view suggests that regulation can facilitate employment growth by promoting innovation and fair competition. We offer a contingency perspective, i.e., that national regulation's effects vary across heterogeneous state political institutions. Drawing on the political science theory of market-preserving federalism, we argue that state-level economic freedom moderates the effects of national regulation on local net job creation. Using U.S. data, we find support for this moderating hypothesis. National regulation destroys jobs on net in states with low economic freedom. However, national regulation has no effect in states with high economic freedom; this effect holds for tax freedom and labor market freedom. The moderation is concentrated among mature firms rather than young firms, and in metro counties rather than non-metro counties; furthermore, it is robust across multiple regulatory measures and instrumental variables approaches. Our work reveals that state political institutions have an underappreciated influence on the costs of national regulation, demonstrating the interdependence of policies for local economic development.
Synthesis centers are a form of scientific organization that catalyzes and supports research that integrates diverse theories, methods and data across spatial or temporal scales to increase the generality, parsimony, applicability, or empirical soundness of scientific explanations. Synthesis working groups are a distinctive form of scientific collaboration that produce consequential, high-impact publications. But no one has asked if synthesis working groups synthesize: are their publications substantially more diverse than others, and if so, in what ways and with what effect? We investigate these questions by using Latent Dirichlet Analysis to compare the topical diversity of papers published by synthesis center collaborations with that of papers in a reference corpus. Topical diversity was operationalized and measured in several ways, both to reflect aggregate diversity and to emphasize particular aspects of diversity (such as variety, evenness, and balance). Synthesis center publications have greater topical variety and evenness, but less disparity, than do papers in the reference corpus. The influence of synthesis center origins on aspects of diversity is only partly mediated by the size and heterogeneity of collaborations: when taking into account the numbers of authors, distinct institutions, and references, synthesis center origins retain a significant direct effect on diversity measures. Controlling for the size and heterogeneity of collaborative groups, synthesis center origins and diversity measures significantly influence the visibility of publications, as indicated by citation measures. We conclude by suggesting social processes within collaborations that might account for the observed effects, by inviting further exploration of what this novel textual analysis approach might reveal about interdisciplinary research, and by offering some practical implications of our results.
This paper engages with the question of why certain radical innovations succeed while others fail or stagnate when encountering established actors and sector logics. We develop an analytical framework that extends the technological innovation systems (TIS) functional approach to explicitly account for contextual factors and entrepreneurial activities. We contribute to two ongoing debates: the conceptualization of context in TIS and the micro-foundation of TIS. First, a two-dimensional matrix is constructed to locate influential factors in the spatial (geographical) and sociotechnical (sectoral) contexts. Second, for early stages of the innovation process, we identify entrepreneurial activities as the locus of the system-building functions, i.e. the activities that use contextual and system-internal factors to develop the novel technological system. We use the TIS approach to analyze the innovation system build-up of peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity trading on a blockchain platform, materializing in two local projects, one in Australia and another in the USA. We find that how and why the new configuration succeeded in productively encountering electricity sector incumbents can be explained by the extent to which entrepreneurs could use opportunities in various contexts across spatial and sectoral boundaries.
This study analyses empirically the effects of counterfeiting on the economic and innovation performance of firms, exploiting a novel and unique dataset that integrates information on custom seizures worldwide during years 2011–2013 with financial accounting data, patent and trademark data for a sample of digital technology companies. We apply diff-in-diff models using a large control sample of non-affected firms. Results provide robust evidence that counterfeiting is associated to a negative impact on operative margins of affected companies, relative to the control sample. The analysis does not find conclusive evidence on the effects of counterfeiting on the innovation activities of affected companies. We find no evidence in support of the hypothesis that counterfeiting could also exert an indirect positive effect on the sales of genuine goods.