Albert Link

University of North Carolina at Greensboro | UNCG · School of Business & Economics - Bryan School

Multiple winners of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards have come under scrutiny by some in the public sector who claim that so-called SBIR mills fail to commercialize from their funded research. We examine this issue using data on a sample of SBIR awards awarded between 1992 and 2001. Consistent with the critique, we find a negative a...

Plain English Summary This paper brings together insights from several disciplines to explore the relationship between colors and trends in U.S. entrepreneurial behavior. Based on the annual trend of Colour of the Year, introduced by the Pantone Colour Institute, and the annual trend in the Kauffman Foundation’s Early-Stage Entrepreneurial Activity...

We identify quantitatively, using cross-country data from the Global Innovation Index, a path through which R&D (research and development) operates to affect economic growth and development. The path we consider is one that relates to enhancing the knowledge economy. Specifically, we contribute to the literature through the quantification of the an...

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) is the fourth largest institute in the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Surprisingly, there is a conspicuous void of policy studies related to the research activities of NHLBI in comparison to NIH or the National Cancer Institute. This paper investigates the likelihood that a business fun...

Homophily studies have tended to focus on gender and race. Albeit that these comparisons are important, a focus on ethnic group relationships is conspicuously absent in the literature. In an effort to begin to fill this void, homophilic ethnic relationships among firm owners and publicly funded research project principal investigators is considered...

Though academic entrepreneurship has long been associated with technology transfer and more broadly with the passage of the Bayh–Dole Act in 1980, we have little understanding of its emergence as a research field. This paper therefore investigates development of the concept of academic entrepreneurship by studying the use of related keywords in the...

In this paper, we study the technology transfer mechanisms used to protect intellectual property by small, entrepreneurial firms that received Phase II research awards from the US Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The technology transfer mechanisms considered are patenting and publishing. Controlling for the agencies that funded th...

Plain English Summary Women entrepreneurs who are awarded Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Awards are less likely than male entrepreneurs to receive follow-on Phase II Awards. We investigate whether women-owned small, entrepreneurial firms, funded through Phase I Small Business Innovation Research awards, are more or less successful than...

In 2000 and 2012, the US Congress charged the National Research Council (NRC) to study how the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program had stimulated technological innovation and used small businesses to meet Federal research and development needs and to recommend program improvements. Using project data collected by the NRC, we suggest t...

Standard Reference Materials® (SRMs®) are high-technology infrastructural elements developed and distributed by the U.S. national metrology institute, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. SRMs are used throughout the economy to enhance production efficiency by reducing information asymmetries and thereby reducing transaction costs be...

Plain English Summary Declining experienced STEM employees at the EPA during President Donald Trump’s Administration is associated with declining innovative environmental scientific publications. A public sector entrepreneur is an individual who champions an innovative public policy. In this paper we propose that President Trump’s Administration’s...

The National Science and Technology Council (CONACYT) was established in 1970 by the Mexican government. CONACYT was formed to promote the scientific development and technological modernization of Mexico through developing high-level human resources, encouraging research projects, and disseminating scientific/technological information. In 2009, CON...

We describe public support for AI research in small firms using data from U.S. Department of Defense-funded SBIR projects. Ours is the first collection of firm-level project information on publicly funded R&D investments in AI. We find that the likelihood of an SBIR funded research project being focused on AI is greater the larger the amount of the...

This paper explores the impact that external sources of information have on the effectiveness of R&D in small, entrepreneurial firms. The effectiveness of R&D is measured in terms of two probabilities: the probability that a firm that received and completed a Phase I SBIR-funded research project is invited to submit a proposal for a Phase II award,...

A spatial distributional analysis of the population of Phase II research projects funded by the US SBIR program in FY 2020 shows differences across states in projects focused on artificial intelligence (AI). AI is a relatively new research field, and this paper contributes to a better understanding of government support for such research. We find t...

In 2017, The New York Times sounded the alarm that ‘the number of [U.S. national] park visitors have reached an unprecedented level, leaving many tourists frustrated and many environmentalists concerned about the toll of overcrowding.’ We address herein the overcrowding issue at Zion National Park in an effort to provide empirical context for upcom...

We analyze what we consider to be an unanticipated consequence of the SBIR program, namely, that firms, publicly funded through the SBIR program, are going public based on their new technology developed with support from the SBIR program. There is a conspicuous void with regard to publicly funded firms that do go public. Through the estimation of a...

Entrepreneurial firms that rely on public research institutes, the third sector of R&D, are also firms that are more innovative in terms of introducing new or significantly improved goods or services to the market. This finding is based on an analysis of 4004 knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms located in ten European Union countries. W...

Intellectual property protection mechanisms (IPPMs) are critical to fostering science, technology, and innovation, and their relevance has grown enormously with the increased trade in goods and services involving patentable technologies. Scholars have investigated factors that facilitate or hinder the use of such IP protection strategies by identif...

The relationship between investments in research and development (R&D) and innovative behavior, measured in terms of new products or services being delivered to the market, is well documented in the literature. This paper departs from the extant literature in that the unit of observation is a country rather than a firm. Using World Bank aggregate d...

We explore the innovative performance of firms resulting from their Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) research-funded projects in terms of the gender dynamics of the firms. Using commercialization as the relevant performance metric, we find that Phase II projects led by a female principal investigator (PI) have greater probability...

The purpose of this paper is to identify covariates with publication activity, a form of knowledge transfer, from SBIR publicly funded research. The paper offers an argument about the policy relevance of studying knowledge transfers from publicly funded research that occurs in private sector firms. Relevant explanatory variables are the length of t...

In this paper, we focus on scientific publications as an innovative output from the research efforts at U.S. federal laboratories. The data used relate to Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). The relationship between R&D expenditures at these federal laboratories and their peer-reviewed scientific publications allows us to ma...

This paper explores the use of publications and patents and their covariates among small, knowledge-based firms pursuing technology commercialization. It does so through an empirical examination of 1180 small firms’ R&D projects, all of which were funded through Phase II U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards. As such, the paper resp...

This paper focuses on a situation in which a firm decides to sell its non-commercialized technology to another firm rather than commercialize it (a latent entrepreneurial firm), and the other firm then adopts the appearance of an emergent entrepreneur. Using U.S. project data from firms funded through the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SB...

Technology-based firms use intellectual property protection mechanisms (IPPMs) to appropriate the returns to their research investments. The empirical literature has generally focused on the use of IPPMs by private sector firms to appropriate the returns to their privately financed R&D-based technologies. To date, studies have not considered the us...

Invention disclosures are one measure of new scientific knowledge that represents and predicts the future scientific research output of a US federal laboratory. In this article, we document a negative shift in the production function for new scientific knowledge as measured by invention disclosures at one federal laboratory, the National Institute...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue of the Review of Industrial Organization on “Entrepreneurship and Industrial Organization” by highlighting the important ways that the literatures of industrial organization and entrepreneurship are highly intertwined. The paper concludes that the two literatures are indeed closely related...

The relevant economics literature on the impact of R&D on patenting activity falls within two methodological areas of inquiry. The first area might be classified as a test of the Schumpeterian hypothesis. The second and lesser research area might be classified as an estimation of the knowledge production function relationship between R&D and patent...

This paper focuses on the regional economic impacts of US university research and science parks. Motivating this focus is the fact that the landscape for private-sector research is changing, and future research might well emphasize America’s “new geography of innovation.” Thus, university research and science parks might face, if they are not alrea...

This paper presents and explains an approach for measuring technological change in the production of new scientific knowledge. The paper expands our previous work on this topic. Our approach is illustrated by using as an example new scientific journal publications from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. The empirical findings...

This book is the first collection of scholarly writings on science and technology parks (STPs) that has an international perspective. It explores concrete ways to systematically collect information on public and private organizations related to their support of and activities in STPs, including incubation to start-up and scale-up, and collaboration...

The premise of this paper is that a basis for firms receiving Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) research awards to develop commercializable technologies is not only their proposed creative ideas but also their endowment of attendant knowledge necessary to develop the technology being proposed. Based on this premise, we propose that those fi...

We summarize and synthesize the frameworks of analysis and quantitative and qualitative evidence from several countries of the impact of science and technology parks (STPs) both on regional development and on tenant firms and territorial development. We observe that the chapters recognize the importance of taking into account the multi-dimensional...

The prospect for the future growth and prosperity of university science and technology parks (STPs) in the United States is questionable. Evidence is presented in this chapter that might lead one to conclude that if STPs are to remain viable, they must reidentify themselves especially in the eyes of their stakeholders. Absent that, critical resourc...

Scientific papers submitted for publication from U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)-funded research projects are an innovative output that has yet to be studied systematically. Using a knowledge production framework, we identify empirically covariates with the number of scientific papers resulting from SBIR projects over the period 1992...

In this paper we review the legislative emphasis on technology transfers from U.S. federal laboratories, and we present a framework to describe how private sector firms benefit from the adoption of technologies from federal laboratories. We conclude that if a federal laboratory can provide the technology being transferred more efficiently than the...

While the academic and policy literature has focused on patent counts and patent quality as possible outcome measures to evaluate the impact of the U.S. Bayh–Dole Act of 1980, we argue that the impact of the Act on university effort to transfer its technology to the private sector might be seen more accurately by examining the trend in the initial...

We view scientific publications as a measure of technical knowledge. Using the Solow method of functional decomposition and scientific publication data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, we find that 79% of the increase in scientific publications per unit of scientific personnel is explained by an increase in federal R&D capit...

A compelling body of research has found that investments in knowledge from other firms and universities spill over to enhance the performance of entrepreneurial firms. This literature has shown that firm performance is positively related to investments in new knowledge by other firms and research universities. This paper addresses a gap in the lite...

Intellectual property protection mechanisms (IPPMs) are critical to fostering innovation and their relevance has grown enormously with the increased trade in goods and services involving intellectual property. Scholars have investigated what factors facilitate or hinder the use of such IP protection strategies, identifying country, sector, and firm...

In this paper, we examine how one important type of relationship, research joint ventures (RJVs), is governed within the context of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Based on agency theory, we investigate the relationship between the governance structure of an RJV and the likelihood that the venture will embrace elements of its research-based ecosystem...

In this paper, links between creativity, design, and innovation are explored through the literature specific to the textile and apparel industries. We discuss the ways that the apparel industry embodies entrepreneurial innovation through creativity and design that makes it an exemplar of the idea of “Main Street” entrepreneurship, albeit one that r...

In this paper we compare the relationship between a firm’s innovation capital and the likelihood that a firm will commercialize an invention. Our index of innovation capital is the product of the firm’s human capital, social capital, and reputational capital. We find from our empirical experiment, which uses Small Business Innovation Research data,...

We define public sector entrepreneurship as having three distinct components: actions that are innovative, that transform a status quo social and economic environment, and that are characterized by uncertainty. While the literature on public sector entrepreneurship dates to the mid-1960s, the scholarly foundations on which public sector entrepreneu...

The purpose of this paper is to explore employment differences over time across China’s hi-tech zones. Using data from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, we find that if a university science park is within a hi-tech zone, employment in that zone is higher, but that finding only holds for zones established in the pre-information communicati...

This introduction to the special issue of the Review of Industrial Organization in honor of Frederic M. Scherer provides an overview of his many seminal contributions to the scholarly literature about industrial organization, his enthusiastic service and support of the industrial organization community and its scholars, and his leadership and servi...

The Schumpeterian hypothesis about the effect of firm size on research and development (R&D) output is studied for a sample of R&D projects for R&D-intensive firms that are small but have substantial variance in their sizes. Across the distribution of firm sizes, the elasticity of patenting with respect to R&D ranged from 0.41 to 0.55, with the ela...

An increasing number of theoretical and empirical analyses address the role of innovation as one of the main sources of firm growth. More recently, studies have looked at the role of gender diversity as a possible determinant of innovation and entrepreneurial performance. However, the relationship between gender and employment growth—a dimension of...

The Stevenson–Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980 made explicit the technology transfer responsibilities of U.S. Federal laboratories. The Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986 and the National Competitiveness Technology Transfer Act of 1989 further enhanced the technology transfer activities of laboratories by permitting Cooperative Researc...

This paper summarizes the extant literature on science and technology parks in an effort to provide a foundation to stimulate additional research in this globally important topic. We find from our review of published scholarship over the past 30 years that attention to science and technology parks has indeed increased, but it has not yet exploded....

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between an entrepreneur’s experience and education and his/her reliance on alternative sources of knowledge for exploring new business opportunities. The extant literature that is at the crossroads between sources of knowledge and the experiential and intellectual base of an entrepreneur (i.e...

This paper shows that the probability of small business firms obtaining outside financing to support their research and development projects is greater given more complex commercial opportunities – defined as a greater number of different potential applications for a project’s anticipated results – for their innovations. The effects on the probabil...

This paper seeks to distinguish between dynamic and static entrepreneurship. We define the construct of dynamic entrepreneurship in terms of Schumpeterian innovativeness and then develop a hypothesis suggesting that human capital is conducive to such action. In contrast, a paucity of human capital is more conducive to static entrepreneurship (defin...

n this paper we explore the effectiveness of selected research and innovation policies among EU countries. Using data from the AEGIS database and information from the 2015 Bruegel’s Partnership report on research and innovation polices in EU countries, we compare and contrast the response of knowledge intensive firms to a sample of policies. We fin...

This book explores public sector entrepreneurship from an international perspective. It features essays from eminent scholars in the field addressing entrepreneurial public policies from different countries. Public sector entrepreneurship is at the cusp of becoming a watchword in international policy circles. This book is a pioneer volume in this e...

There is an extensive literature on the success/failure of firm-funded R&D projects, but growing policy interest focuses on publicly funded R&D projects. We discuss this literature, which builds on a long stream of research of which Albert Rubenstein was a prime investigator, and use the literature to motivate the theoretical and empirical parts of...

This paper assesses the R&D performance of nascent and established technology-based small firms that receive a Phase II R&D award from the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Our empirical analysis is based on a two-stage selection probit model, which is used to estimate the probability of commercialization conditional on the Ph...

The role of gender in entrepreneurship has been thoroughly investigated. However, less is known about gender differences in access to private investment when attempting to develop a new technology. In this paper, we use data collected by the National Research Council of the National Academies to estimate differences between the probability that a f...

The term “entrepreneurship” apparently means different things to different people including scholars and thought leaders. Because entrepreneurship is multifaceted, it is studied from many different perspectives, yet, that has fostered a multitude of definitions. Even the scholarly literature (where normally the deepest understanding would be found)...

US technology-based initiatives at the state level continue to emphasize regional economic development and job growth. Many are now also focused on green technologies. This paper describes one such green program, the North Carolina Green Business Fund. Based on an analysis of 24 funded R&D projects in 2008 and 2009, we find that 59 new full-time eq...

This paper models the entrepreneurial process as both creation and discovery composed of an iterative two-step process where entrepreneurs create social networks based on subjective expectations about the future effectiveness of those networks, and then choose the innovation to pursue and map a search process to discover how to bring the innovation...