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Publications (64)
This paper argues that openness, by lowering costs to access existing research, can enhance both early and late stage innovation through greater exploration of novel research directions. We examine a natural experiment in openness: late-1990s NIH agreements that reduced academics’ access costs regarding certain genetically engineered mice. Implemen...
Ever since Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others launched crowdfunding platforms, there has been great demand for crowdfunding to move beyond in-kind rewards to equity, so that a broader group of people might share in the returns of the “next big idea.” However, for the vast majority of people, getting in on the ground floor of an innovative, new star...
The objective of this paper is to evaluate the role that formal intellectual property rights (IPR) play in shaping the downstream demand for knowledge that is initially disclosed through scientific publication in fields where research is generated and utilized across different institutional settings (i.e. academia versus industry). For scientific d...
Not all startup companies are created equal. Although both innovation-driven enterprises (IDEs) and traditional small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can provide valuable products and services and create jobs, IDEs – startups focused on addressing global markets based on technological, process or business model innovation – can potentially cre...
When do scientists and other innovators organize into collaborative teams, and why do they do so for some projects and not others? At the core of this important organizational choice is, we argue, a trade-off scientists make between the productive efficiency of collaboration and the credit allocation that arises after the completion of collaborativ...
This paper provides a systematic examination of the use of a Grand Innovation Prize (GIP) in action – the Progressive Automotive Insurance X PRIZE – a $10 million prize for a highly efficient vehicle. Following a mechanism design approach we define three key dimensions for GIP evaluation: objectives, design, and performance, where prize design incl...
To what extent does "false science" impact the rate and direction of scientific change? We examine the impact of more than 1,100 scientific retractions on the citation trajectories of articles that are close neighbors of retracted articles in intellectual space but were published prior to the retraction event. Our results indicate that following re...
Philanthropy plays a major role in university-based scientific, engineering and medical research in the United States contributing over $4Billion annually to operations, endowment and buildings devoted to research. When combined with endowment income, university research funding from science philanthropy is $7Billion a year. This major contribution...
This paper articulates a citation-based approach to science policy evaluation and employs that approach to investigate the impact of the United States' 2001 policy regarding the federal funding of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research. We evaluate the impact of the policy on the level of U. S. hESC research, the U.S. position at the knowledge f...
â–º We analyze the universe of peer-reviewed scientific articles retracted from the biomedical literature between 1972 and 2006 to identify the correlates, timing, and implications of retraction. â–º Relative to a matched control sample, we find that key predictors of retraction are those related to article prominence, including early citation and...
Is collaboration creative or costly for knowledge workers? While collaboration has been shown to be associated with higher quality creative output, much less is known about whether collaborative work is productively efficient for knowledge work overall. In order to understand the “net value” of collaboration, it is important to therefore consider b...
No abstract available.
Knowledge disclosure plays a central role in models of economic growth. Few studies, however, have established the conditions that support or inhibit such disclosures. In this paper, we provide a theoretical model that evaluates the conditions supporting the disclosure of privately funded knowledge through scientific publication, patenting, or both...
This paper examines the interactions between the Republic of Science and the Patent System that shape the incentives for innovators and the disclosure of innovations across technical fields. It therefore places our understanding of the patent system and decisions around knowledge disclosure in patents into a broader context, illustrating how policy...
This paper examines argues that while two distinct perspectives characterize the foundations of the public funding of research – filling a selection gap and solving a disclosure problem – in fact both the selection choices of public funders and their criteria for disclosure and commercialization shape the level and type of funding for research and...
Knowledge disclosure plays a central role in models of economic growth. In this paper, we provide a theoretical model that evaluates the conditions supporting disclosures of privately funded knowledge through scientific publication, patenting, or both. Our analysis is grounded in the conflicting incentives facing researchers and their funders: scie...
Funders and universities should make the products of research more available - even if today's researchers pay a price, say Jeffrey L. Furman, Fiona Murray and Scott Stern.
Conventional wisdom suggests that when institutional logics overlap, the production of hybrids signifies collapse, blending, or easy coexistence. The author provides an alternative interpretation: hybrids can maintain a distinctive boundary and can emerge from contestation, not coexistence. This alternative interpretation is grounded in an analysis...
This paper examines gender differences in the participation of university life science faculty in commercial science. Based on theory and field interviews, we develop hypotheses regarding how scientists’ productivity, co-authorship networks, and institutional affiliations have different effects on whether male and female faculty become “academic en...
How do public and private researchers
respond to a breakthrough inducing new
research opportunities? Modeling the process of
step-by-step innovation as a control rights problem,
this paper evaluates comparative research
strategies of public versus private researchers
as they respond to a common breakthrough
that induces many potential follow-on res...
We re-conceptualize the role of science policy makers, envisioning and illustrating their move from being simple investors in scientific projects to entrepreneurs who create the conditions for entrepreneurial experiments and initiate them. We argue that reframing science policy around the notion of conducting entrepreneurial experiments – experimen...
Knowledge-based firms seeking competitive advantage often draw on the public knowledge stream (ideas embedded in public commons institutions) as the foundation for private knowledge (ideas firms protect through private intellectual property [IP] institutions). However, understanding of the converse relationship—the impact of private knowledge strat...
Scientific freedom and openness are hallmarks of academia: relative to their counterparts in industry, academics maintain discretion over their research agenda and allow others to build on their discoveries. This paper examines the relationship between openness and freedom, building on recent models emphasizing that, from an economic perspective, f...
This paper examines gender differences in the participation of university life science faculty in commercial science. In part based on interviews, we develop hypotheses regarding how scientists’ career achievements—their productivity, co-authorship networks, and institutional affiliations—have different effects on whether male and female facu...
By taking conventionalist view of the evolution of biotechnology, we suggest that the process by which entrepreneurs determined what made biotechnology valuable and figured out how to organize around such an economic logic was contested. The shape that biotechnology has ultimately taken emerged from the resolution of these contests. Convention theo...
Knowledge-based firms seeking competitive advantage often draw on the public knowledge stream - ideas embedded in public commons institutions - as the foundation for private knowledge - ideas firms protect through private intellectual property (IP) institutions. However, we have a limited understanding of the converse relationship: the impact of pr...
Despite the long-held belief of positive effect of patenting on public research and commercialization of science, scholars now assert its detrimental impacts on follow-on innovation. Using human gene patents, our study contributes to literature on patent design and effects of patents on public research while informing policy and patenting strategie...
Scholarly studies of how the law affects knowledge work tend to fall between two extreme views. Economists, as well as legal and policy scholars, debate how changes in legal institutions, particularly in expanding property rights, shape the daily lives of knowledge workers. In contrast, ethnographies of knowledge work usually fail to highlight lawy...
Organizational theorists have built a deep understanding of the conditions affecting knowledge sharing. However, for innovation to occur, knowledge must not just be shared, but also reused, recombined, and accumulated. Such accumulation is not inherent to the innovation process but can be either supported or limited by the context in which it occur...
This article has no abstract; the first 100 words appear below.
University of Wisconsin researcher James Thomson and his colleagues wowed the scientific community when they reported in November 1998 that they had isolated and cultured human embryonic stem cells.¹ They also precipitated intense debate. Although moral dilemmas and federal funding of...
Growing opportunities for academic scientists to commercialize their science has led to a new commercial marketplace. Recent
evidence suggests that “commercial science” participation is characterized by gender stratification. Using interviews with
life science faculty at one high-status university we examine the mechanisms that instituted, reinforc...
ABSTRACT While some innovation scholars fear that the landscape of innovation is becoming more restricted due to an expansion of intellectual property rights, others show that innovation processes are becoming more open. The question which unites these disparate literatures is not whether intellectual property rights are more expanded or relaxed, b...
Fiona Murray and Debora Spar discuss whether, in research on embryonic stem cells, for which the U.S. government currently severely restricts federal funding, China could surpass the United States in either research or commercial development.
We analyzed longitudinal data on academic careers and conducted interviews with faculty members to determine the scope and
causes of the gender gap in patenting among life scientists. Our regressions on a random sample of 4227 life scientists over
a 30-year period show that women faculty members patent at about 40% of the rate of men. We found that...
An analysis of life-science initial public offerings from three time periods reveals that the equity share received by universities and their academic researchers has changed over time.
The impact of gene patents on downstream research and innovation are unknown, in part because of a lack of empirical data on the extent and nature of gene patenting. In this Policy Forum, the authors show that 20% of human gene DNA sequences are patented and that some genes are patented as many as 20 times. Unsurprisingly, genes associated with hea...
Although many scholars suggest that IPR has a positive effect on cumulative innovation, a growing “anti-commons” perspective highlights the negative role of IPR over scientific knowledge. At its core, this debate is centered on how intellectual property rights over a given piece of knowledge affect the propensity of future researchers to build upon...
Access to a pool of talented employees is an important element of entrepreneurial firms’ ability to build innovative capabilities. Through an empirical examination of two European biotechnology clusters – Cambridge, UK, and Munich, Germany – we investigate the degree to which macro-labor market institutions shape the micro-dynamics of career affili...
While science-based entrepreneurial firms are a key feature of the modern economy, our insights into their organization and productivity remain limited. In particular, our understanding of the mechanisms through which academic inventors shape entrepreneurial firms established to commercialize their scientific ideas is based upon a traditional persp...
An analysis of deal structures in biotechnology from the past 25 years reveals that universities often neglect important economic aspects in their licensing agreements.
Despite an increasing emphasis on the role of senior management cognition in shaping organizational action, there have been few attempts to link top management mental models to strategic choice in the face of discontinuous innovation. This paper uses 23 years of data covering 15 major pharmaceutical firms to explore the degree to which each firm's...
The question of exactly how science is commercialized is an important one. While the social structures of “science” and “technology” are distinctive, recent work suggests that scientific and technological ideas in fact co-evolve. This paper addresses the dynamics of such co-evolution: are scientific networks deeply co-mingled with networks through...
Motivated by the central role of voluntary knowledge disclosure in ensuring cumulative progress, this paper evaluates the conditions supporting the disclosure of privately funded new knowledge through scientific publication, patenting, or both. We ground our analysis in the incentives facing researchers and their funders: scientists have incentives...
This paper argues that openness of upstream research does not sim- ply encourage higher levels of downstream exploitation, it also raises the incentives for additional upstream research by encouraging the establish- ment of entirely new research directions. We test this hypothesis by ex- amining a \natural experiment" in openness within the academi...
Abstract Law plays a central, but under-appreciated role in knowledge work. While the broad institutional foundations of the role of law, specifically the patentsystem, in shaping the production of knowledge have been articulated, much of the current literature is based on equilibrium assumptions about the role of law. However this approach has led...
ABSTRACT The question of exactly how science is transformed into technology and reaches the market is an old and important one. While the social structures of “science” and “technology” are quite different, recent work suggests that science and technology may in fact co-evolve through a much more bi-directional interaction than was originally thoug...
Firms using knowledge for competitive advantage seek to incorporate ideas from public knowledge stream into their private, patented knowledge streams. While management scholarship focuses on improving the link from public to private knowledge streams, policy literature suggests firm patents reduce public knowledge stream. This is particularly salie...
The net welfare benefit of 'brain drain' of skilled workers depends on their propen-sity to return to their home countries. I study the return migration decisions of a sample of migrants with very high skills-foreign faculty in research-intensive U.S. uni-versities. Whereas statistical offices typically fail to follow workers who move across border...
Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2009 This presentation was part of the session : Policy Actors and Relationships In this paper we investigate the impact of the August 2001 U.S. administration stem cell research policy on the rate and composition of stem cell research in the United States in comparison to other countries. Althoug...