Research Policy最新文献

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) play a key role in increasingly intangible economies. At the same time IPR systems are facing a profound legitimacy crisis, as scholars have unveiled perverse mechanisms and strategic practices that can severely hinder their expected societal returns.

In this introduction to the Special Issue, we provide an overview of the key debates and the recent evidence on the societal role of IPRs. After providing a brief introduction to IPRs and their specific societal function, we integrate insights from different disciplinary discourses into several key emerging themes. We highlight the progress made in recent research, but also flag urgent research gaps and directions to further expand the frontiers of scholarly and policy debates.

The steady growth of large geographically dispersed research projects challenges existing norms for authorship attribution and has raised concerns over global inequalities in authorship opportunities. This paper therefore examines how geography plays a role in authorship attribution to local researchers that contribute to large scientific teams from various cities across the globe. We develop theory that considers how authorship opportunities for local researchers may vary depending on how they are spatially embedded in projects and the local resources they draw upon. We empirically apply this framework to the context of multi-city clinical trials where a common authorship challenge concerns the attribution of site investigators on publications. To account for selection effects in our empirical set-up, we estimate authorship likelihood conditional on data collection contributions. Our results show that authorship likelihoods differ considerably across research projects and cities. We observe that, after controlling for project characteristics, authorship likelihoods are higher when local site investigators are located in cities that are geographically proximate to coordinating sponsors and when they face less national competition. We also find that local scientific reputation and the extent to which project contributions are directed to local problems are positively related to authorship likelihood. Observed findings are markedly more pronounced for industry-sponsored versus publicly-sponsored trials and when attributing authorship to a lead author compared to any author. Based on these findings, we discuss various ways through which authorship policies and initiatives could foster equitable authorship opportunities in large teams independent of location and as a fundamental principle for the conduct of science.

We examine validity and bias in external review letters (ERLs) in academic settings. ERLs play a critical role in promotion and tenure (P&T) decisions across the globe, ending careers in some cases while allowing other scientists' careers to flourish. We coded and analyzed 995 ERLs submitted by letter writers at various institutions as part of the P&T portfolios of 195 candidates at an R1 university. We examined their relationship with P&T committees' percent of positive votes by department, college, and university committees. We investigated how ERL linguistic features, letter writer characteristics, and candidate characteristics (productivity and gender) relate to P&T decision-making. Results show writer characteristics are more strongly related than candidate characteristics to ERL linguistic features associated with P&T decisions at the department and university levels. We develop recommendations for policymakers, including changes in the use of ERLs for the P&T process.

Early career funding is usually the first prestigious funding young scientists receive, allowing them to make their debut on a nationally recognised foundation. In this study, we examined the impact of an early debut on young scientists' research productivity. First-movers and late-comers are distinguished based on the years between the first application to the final award of early career funding. We then explored the variations between 3353 first-movers and 4650 late-comers of the Young Scientists Fund sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. We find that an early debut has a strong positive short-term effect on research productivity in terms of both quantity and quality, and the positive effect amplifies with the increasing time span of the final award between first-movers and late-comers. However, the strong positive effect on long-term productivity presents only in the three- and four-year early debuts. These results suggest that the productivity gains of young scientists with an early debut tend to decrease over time. The significant gap between first-movers and three-, and four-year late-comers in the long term demonstrates a time threshold which distinguishes scientists' long-term research productivity. In addition, we find that the research productivity gap can be explained by the expanding research network and increasing funding opportunities.

Interfaces play a key role in facilitating the integration of external sources of innovation and structuring ecosystems. They have been conceptualized as design rules that ensure the interoperability of independently produced modules, with important strategic value for lead firms to attract and control access to complementary assets in platform ecosystems. While meaningful, these theorizations do not fully capture the value and structuring role of web APIs in digital innovation ecosystems. We show this with an empirical study of the online travel ecosystem in the 26 years (1995–2021) after the first Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) were launched. Our findings reveal that web APIs foster a dynamic digital innovation ecosystem with a distributed networked structure in which multiple actors design and use them. We provide evidence of an ecosystem where decentralized interfaces enable decentralized governance and where interfaces establish not only cooperative relationships, but also competitive ones. Instead of locking in complementors, web APIs enable the integration of capabilities from multiple organizations for the co-production of services and products, by interfacing their information systems. Web APIs are important sources of value creation and capture, increasingly being used to offer or sell services, constituting important sources of revenue.

This article condenses a variety of entrepreneurship support mechanisms—formal and informal ones—and, more importantly, assesses touch points of university members who actually became entrepreneurs (i.e., academic entrepreneurs) with such support mechanisms. Specifically, we apply an individual-centric perspective and scrutinize to what extent academic entrepreneurs (i) observe, (ii) use, and (iii) benefit from entrepreneurship support mechanisms. Mapping survey data from 229 academic entrepreneurs with archival data covering 107 universities in Austria and Germany enables us to test a unique dataset through hierarchical linear regressions. Our results reveal that academic entrepreneurs' observation of support mechanisms is a strong predictor of their entrepreneurial climate perception. This effect is weakened by high shares of formal support mechanisms, emphasizing the important role of informal entrepreneurship support mechanisms. Surprisingly, the actual usage of observed support mechanisms does not have a significant effect on entrepreneurial climate perceptions at universities. Instead, the usage of support mechanisms only strengthens or weakens entrepreneurial climate perceptions depending on how beneficial the used support mechanisms have been to the academic entrepreneurs. Our findings illuminate that how academic entrepreneurs perceive the entrepreneurial climate at their alma mater hinges on their different levels of prior contact with support mechanisms.

This paper provides empirical evidence on the role of technology in affecting the relationship between the participation of EU countries and industries in Global Value Chains (GVCs) and their employment structure over the period 2000–2014. The empirical analysis is based on country-sector level data for 21 EU countries on employment, trade in value added, patents and investments in intangible assets, and focusses on backward linkages within GVCs. The role of technology is analysed by taking into account both the technological intensity of country-sectors participating in GVC and that of their GVC partners. We study the employment structure by looking at the shares of managers and manual workers, which reflect the “functional specialisation” of the country-sector within GVCs. We find that participation in GVC per se is not related to the employment structure of a country-sector. We show that different patterns of GVC integration and functional specialisation emerge that depend on the initial patents/intangibles intensity of the country-sector integrating in GVC and those of the partners.

Innovation ecosystems have gained significant scholarly and managerial attention. Much of the literature focuses on established ecosystems, and the limited research that examines ecosystem emergence does not dig deeper into the dynamics and challenges during the process of emergence. With a focus on the transition from birth to growth of an ecosystem, this paper fills this important gap by systematically examining how a nascent ecosystem develops into a thriving one. Employing a conceptualized composition approach, we conduct an in-depth qualitative study on the emergence of the modern small satellite ecosystem from 1981 to 2017. Our case analysis demonstrates a dynamic process through which a seed innovation gradually grows into a thriving ecosystem without a centralized sponsor. We explicate how tensions arise within an evolving ecosystem and how forces hindering specialization delay the emergence process. We then develop a process model of ecosystem emergence to conceptualize how actors gradually become specialized, how their specialization decisions coevolve with the ecosystem value proposition, and how tensions get resolved through a complex and iterative process. We contribute to the literature by advancing an evolutionary view of ecosystem emergence with an in-depth analysis of the transition from birth to growth of an ecosystem.

The properties of emerging, digital, general-purpose technologies make it hard to observe their adoption by firms and identify the salient determinants of adoption. However, these aspects are critical since the patterns related to early-stage diffusion establish path-dependencies which have implications for the distribution of the technological opportunities and socio-economic returns linked to these technologies. We focus on the case of artificial intelligence (AI) and train a transformer language model to identify firm-level AI adoption using textual data from over 1.1 million websites and constructing a hyperlink network that includes >380,000 firms in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We use these data to expand and test epidemic models of inter-firm technology diffusion by integrating the concepts of social capital and network embeddedness. We find that AI adoption is related to three epidemic effect mechanisms: 1) Indirect co-location in industrial and regional hot-spots associated to production of AI knowledge; 2) Direct exposure to sources transmitting deep AI knowledge; 3) Relational embeddedness in the AI knowledge network. The pattern of adoption identified is highly clustered and features a rather closed system of AI adopters which is likely to hinder its broader diffusion. This has implications for policy which should facilitate diffusion beyond localized clusters of expertise. Our findings also point to the need to employ a systemic perspective to investigate the relation between AI adoption and firm performance to identify whether appropriation of the benefits of AI depends on network position and social capital.

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated social distancing at every level of society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for scientific and scholarly advance. Using customized author surveys about the intellectual influence of referenced work on scientists' own papers, combined with precise measures of geographical and semantic distance between focal and referenced works, we find that being at the same institution is strongly associated with intellectual influence on scientists' and scholars' published work. However, this influence increases with intellectual distance: the more different the referenced work done by colleagues at one's institution, the more influential it is on one's own. Universities worldwide constitute places where people doing very different work engage in sustained interactions through departments, committees, seminars, and communities. These interactions come to uniquely influence their published research, suggesting the need to replace rather than displace diverse engagements for sustainable advance.