Knowledge that Transforms

An ongoing interest in innovation studies is to understand how knowledge generated from scientific research can be used in the development of technologies. While previous inquiries have devoted to studying the scientific capacity of technologies and institutional factors facilitating technology transfer, little is known about the intrinsic characteristics of scientific publications that gain direct technological impact. Here we focus on two features, namely basicness and novelty. Using a corpus of 3.8 million papers published between 1980 and 1999, we find that basic science papers and novel papers are substantially more likely to achieve direct technological impact. Further analysis that limits to papers with technological impact reveals that basic science and novel science have more patent citations, experience shorter time lag, and have impact in broader technological fields.

Despite the economic significance of patented university research, it is difficult to measure the economic value of academic patented inventions and observe the extent to which universities are able to capture such value through patent licensing. Moving beyond assessing commercialization performance by simple statistics, we propose a new approach to benchmarking university patents and commercialization performance based on comparative corporate patent value. Our procedure involves matching university patents to patents with similar patent characteristics granted to public corporations, then estimating the “potential value” of these university patents by stock market reactions to grants of the matched corporate patents. These estimated values of university patents can significantly explain the technology-level income from licensing by a leading US research university and the annual licensing income of the member universities of the Association of University Technology Managers’ (AUTM). We find that AUTM universities realize an average of 16% of the estimated value of matched corporate patents. We also investigate correlates of university‐level potential patent value and suggest avenues for future research.

Intensifying debates regarding the capacity of innovation policy to contribute to addressing complex problems requires analysis of the relationship between different policy approaches and the concepts of sustainability and sustainable regional development. This paper makes an important contribution to this endeavour by considering the potential of the place based Smart Specialisation (S3) approach to be used as a vehicle for governing regional sustainability transitions. The potential for alignment between the Transitions Management (TM) framework and S3, predicated upon the central role of collaborative discourse in each, provides the analytical lens to explore this issue. Key factors which both promote and inhibit the potential of S3 to effectively pursue a sustainability agenda are identified. An exploratory case study of the first stages of implementation of S3 in Gippsland, Australia, suggests that the policy approach can be adapted to address some of the challenges. However, it also suggests that adaptation of the S3 process may act to conceal unacknowledged, systemic issues, with profound implications for its capacity to promote societal transition within constrained time frames.

The notion of related variety has proved to be an important contribution to the literature on innovation-enhancing regional knowledge externalities in different industry structures. Related variety provides a disentangled view of diversification based on the technological and cognitive proximity of different industries. The core hypothesis of this concept, which states that related variety fosters innovation and employment growth by facilitating knowledge spillovers, has gained increasing empirical support. To date, a relatively modest number of empirical studies have explicitly linked related variety to enhanced regional innovative output. The role of entrepreneurship has also received little attention in the literature, even though economic theory emphasizes that entrepreneurs have an important role in transforming spillovers of knowledge into innovation and growth. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the extant literature on regional innovation with an analysis that probes deeper into the mechanism by which related variety fosters innovation, and to examine how knowledge appropriation mechanisms affects the entrepreneurial opportunities that external knowledge presents. Our empirical analysis employs a moderated and mediated model with non-linear knowledge spillover effects of related variety. We use panel data on 60 Swedish functional analysis regions for the years 2008–2016 and estimate fixed effects models to examine the relationships between related variety, regional innovation and entrepreneurship. Conceptually, our results disentangle the effects of regional knowledge stocks and related variety on the rate at which new ideas are commercialized through entrepreneurship. We find a substantial direct effect of knowledge stocks, and an important indirect effect via knowledge spillovers between cognitively similar firms. A key contribution of this paper is that we show that this effect is conditional on the extent to which knowledge appropriation mechanisms are implemented, which has not been adressed in the literature on knowledge spillover effects of related variety before. Another novel contribution of this paper is that we find evidence of diminishing marginal returns to related variety with respect to innovation and entrepreneurship.

Several studies have sought evidence as to whether ethnically diverse teams promote a diversity in knowledge and perspectives which is beneficial for innovation. In multicultural societies, however, there are multiple opportunities for exchange between people from different ethnic backgrounds, and the extent to which such encounters actually imply cognitive diversity seems debatable. We propose to regard as diverse those combinations of ethnic backgrounds that are relatively unlikely to occur under a hypothesis of random allocation to firms, based on the distribution of nationalities at NUTS3 level. We label this measure ``unusualness'' and apply it to the study of innovation in newly founded firms in Germany. Our results reveal that unusualness has a robust positive association with the probability of a start-up introducing an innovation within the first two years of business, while diversity as measured by a standard Blau index is insignificant. The results are robust to a large set of robustness checks. We interpret these results as an indication that not all combinations of national origins matter for innovation, but only those that are associated with differences in cognitive approaches and knowledge.

The mechanisms responsible for the structure and evolution of technological systems are not fully understood. This study examines the network of supply and use of significant innovations across industries in Sweden, 1970-2013. The results suggest that at least 30% of innovation patterns can be statistically predicted by network stimulus from both backward and forward linkages in the Swedish economy. The network is hierarchical, characterized by hubs that connect diverse industries in closely knitted communities. To account for the structure and evolution of innovation networks, the study proposes a preferential weight assignment process, allowing historical technological linkages and proximities to influence future outcomes. The empirical results show that the properties of the Swedish innovation network are strongly predicted by this process, while skill, knowledge and economic interdependencies have significant but more complex effects on link formation. The results are consistent with the idea that innovations emerge in synergistic communities, but suggest that the transformation of technological systems is shaped by technological requirements, imbalances, and opportunities that are not straightforwardly related to other economic or knowledge proximities.

Whereas extant alliance research tends to consider the knowledge pool of partner firms as a set of independent components, we highlight that alliance partners’ components are interconnected. In particular, we introduce the concept of alliance partner knowledge recombination novelty – i.e., the extent to which an alliance partner has created component ties that no other firm within the industry has created – and hypothesize that it has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the focal firm's utilization of the alliance partner's knowledge. We also expect this relationship to be moderated by the focal firm's own knowledge recombination novelty. Analyzing 313 R&D alliance dyads of 70 firms in the fuel cell industry, we find support for the hypothesized inverted U-shaped relationship between an alliance partner's knowledge recombination novelty and the focal firm's knowledge utilization from the alliance partner. However, we do not find support for a moderation effect of the focal firm's knowledge recombination novelty. Based on these findings, we demonstrate the importance of framing alliance partner knowledge pools as sets of interconnected components, where alliance partners’ history of knowledge recombination shapes the focal firm's knowledge utilization rates.

We examine the impact of a journal's ranking on the citations its papers garner. Our testbed is journals included in the early annual publications of the Academic Journal Guide, published by the Association of Business Schools from 2007 to 2010. By focusing on a small subset of these journals, we provide causal evidence that an increase in a journal's ranking will increase citations to its papers. We argue that this increase can be attributed to (i) more authors learning about and viewing these outlets and their publications and (ii) researchers signalling their paper's own impact by citing highly ranked journals. We find some evidence for the former, though not robust, and substantial evidence for the latter. Given that signalling is deliberate and associated with incentives to publish in highly ranked journals, we decompose this channel by citing researchers’ characteristics. Except for senior academics, all types of researchers are consistent with signalling. The policy implications of our results relate to the pervasive use of journal rankings and recent initiatives to evaluate research.

The principle of relatedness allows us to explore the likelihood that territories diversify their current technological portfolios based on the global co-occurrence patterns of technologies. Countries that excel at developing semiconductors should develop mobile phones because both technologies require similar endogenous capacities, including scientific knowledge. However, thus far, studies have been mostly limited to the knowledge common base assumption and have not questioned enough whether different scientific endogenous capacities may be behind similar diversification performances. To address this question, we introduce the concept of scientific and technological cross-density, which we define as the average proximity of a new potential technology to a country's scientific and technological portfolio. To conceptualize and measure the effect that scientific and technological cross-density may have on technological diversification, we applied a two-stage methodology to a sample of 182 countries during the 1988–2014 period. First, we build a network, the science and technology cross-space, (sci-tech cross-space), which relates knowledge and technologies based on co-occurrence values. Second, we estimate the effect of scientific-technological cross-density and technological density on technological diversification at the country level. We find that the more a new technology is related to a country's scientific portfolio, the greater its entry probability; additionally, the effect of technological density on technological diversification is greater than the effect of scientific and technological density.

In this study, we analyze the effect of the introduction of university regulations supporting academic entrepreneurship. Using a sample of 611 companies spun-off from the 64 Italian Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM) universities between 2002 and 2012, we show that university regulations in support of academic entrepreneurship have a positive effect on the creation of academic spin-offs. Nevertheless, their effectiveness is conditioned by specific contingencies. First, the characteristics of university departments influence the positive effect of the regulation: in some cases, there is a substitution effect rather than a complementary one. Second, the design of the regulation impacts the decisions of academic staff regarding whether to start a new venture. Finally, the effect of the regulation is maximized four years after its introduction and then becomes less effective. This paper contributes to the debate on the evaluation of policies supporting science-based entrepreneurship.