Research Policy最新文献

We examine how latecomers should allocate resources between innovation and imitation to overtake industry leaders across different technological regimes, characterized by appropriability, cumulativeness, and cycle time of technologies (CTT). Using computational models, we find that a one-sided focus on either innovation or imitation impedes technological leadership changes. Also, findings suggest that at early stages with low-level technologies, latecomers should prioritize imitation by allocating more resources to it. However, as they advance, a greater allocation of R&D resources to innovation becomes crucial. Next, we investigate the role of various technological regime variables in the interplay between this innovation-imitation mix. First, our simulations indicate that under a regime of low appropriability and high cumulativeness, allocating more resources to imitation tends to be more effective than focusing on innovation. Second, our simulations reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between CTT and the probability of latecomers overtaking industry leaders. There exists a certain level of CTT that maximizes the overtaking possibility because a short CTT offers latecomers opportunities from rapid obsolescence of leaders’ technologies but constrains latecomers’ learning from existing technologies. With a short CTT, it is advantageous for latecomers, particularly those starting with a low technology level, to allocate more resources to imitation.

This study investigated the impact of corporate innovation behavior resulting from the establishment of a personal data protection system (PDPS), with an emphasis on self-regulation. The findings revealed that implementing the PDPS significantly enhanced firms' innovation quantity by mitigating financial constraints and reducing risks However, concerning innovation quality, establishing a PDPS may hinder innovation novelty because of the limited availability of scarce data resources and information. Further analysis indicated that the above relationships became more pronounced when companies faced a heightened demand for personal data protection from the market, such as businesses facing a favorable economic institutional environment, businesses engaged in overseas operations, those operating in private data-sensitive industries, and those confronting cyber-attack threats. Additionally, firms' adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies resulted in a more significant effect of the PDPS on innovation quantity promotion and mitigated the inhibition of innovation quality. This study contributes to the existing research on privacy regulations and the determinants of corporate innovation. Unlike policy-event studies on personal data protection laws, this study focuses on the economic consequences of companies voluntarily implementing a PDPS and comprehensively characterizes its impact on corporate innovation behavior from both qualitative and quantitative aspects. Practical implications are also offered to the government, suggesting how to formulate relevant policies to promote a balance between enforcing policies and encouraging companies to autonomously enhance the PDPS, which is beneficial for fostering innovation in terms of quality and quantity.

Journal lists for the assessment of academic performance are widely used worldwide and inform many important decisions, such as, academic workload, salary, hiring, promotion, and tenure. The use of such lists, however, has long been a very controversial area in academia. Surprisingly, to date, there has been little empirical research investigating directly how journal lists have influenced publishing patterns by academics. This paper examines how the Academic Journal Guide (AJG) produced by the Chartered association of Business Schools has influenced the publishing patterns of UK academics by observing the authorship of over 400,000 papers published between 1 January 2011 and 30 June 2021. In terms of the AJG ratings, UK researchers have improved the quality of their research outputs over the period. There is strong evidence, however, that researchers in subject areas primarily associated with business schools are targeting the ratings rather than other measures of research quality. In these areas, journals that have been promoted/demoted in the AJG list have a higher/lower proportion of papers by UK researchers than similar journals that have not changed status. In addition, journals that have been promoted unjustifiably by reference to other metrics attract particularly high proportions of papers by UK researchers whereas those that have been demoted justifiably attract particularly low proportions of papers by UK researchers. Overall, whilst researchers are responding to publishing incentives, one of their strategies for doing so seems to be to game the AJG list. I discuss the implications of my findings and ways in which the negative aspects could be reduced.

We argue that the degree of concentrated ownership of international knowledge connections of a city in the hands of a small number of MNEs reduces the potential for knowledge spillovers and has a negative influence on the attractiveness of a city for new R&D investments. Ownership concentration in international knowledge connections reduces the positive influence of two complementary characteristics of international knowledge connectivity: the international connectedness (“depth”) and the geographical diversity (“breadth”) of the cities' international knowledge networks. Our analysis of the location decisions for 3235 new cross-border R&D investments made by 1599 firms distributed across 71 global cities (2003–2016) provides support for these hypotheses.

We study the mental health of PhD students in Sweden using comprehensive administrative data on prescriptions, specialist care visits, hospitalizations, and causes of death. We find that about 7 % (5 %) of PhD students receive medication or diagnosis for depression (anxiety) in a given year. These prevalence rates are less than one-third of the earlier reported survey-based estimates, and even after adjusting for difference in methodology, 43 % (72 %) of the rates in the literature. Nevertheless, PhD students still fare worse than their peers not pursuing graduate studies. Our difference-in-differences research design attributes all of this health disadvantage to the time in the PhD program. This deterioration suggests doctoral studies causally affect mental health.

This paper examines the impact of liberalization on the direction of technological change in the electricity sector. To this end, I use data on electricity-related patents filed between 1990 and 2018 in combination with a set of patent-level quality indicators and an instrumental variable approach. The results show that electricity liberalization leads to less dirty innovations and more clean energy patents. The increase in clean energy patenting is driven by innovations in electricity storage, renewable energy and combustion technologies with mitigation potential. New entrants play a key role in the increase in clean energy patents, while incumbents are responsible for the decline in dirty innovations. The reform also affects the knowledge inputs used in the development of clean energy technologies and encourages the use of knowledge spillovers from other technological fields.

HIV/AIDS has been a major focus for research funders. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone has spent over $70bn on HIV/AIDS. Such investments ushered in antiviral drugs, helping to reverse a rapidly growing HIV/AIDS pandemic. However, the idea that research can deliver unexpected benefits beyond its targeted field, in fact, predates HIV/AIDS to at least Vannevar Bush's influential 1945 report. Cross-disease spillovers – research investments that yield benefits beyond the target disease – remains unexplored, even though it could inform both priority-setting and calculations of returns on research investments. To this end, we took a sample of NIH's HIV grants and examined their publications. We analyzed 118,493 publications and found that 62 % of these were spillovers. We used Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms assigned to publications to explore the content of these spillovers, as well as to corroborate non-spillovers. We located spillovers on a network of MeSH co-occurrence, drawn from the broader universe of biomedical publications, for comparison. We found that HIV spillovers were unevenly distributed across disease-space, and often in close proximity to HIV (60 % local; 40 % remote). We further reviewed 1000 grant–publication pairs from a local sample and 1000 pairs from a remote sample. For local spillovers, a quarter seemed to be unexpected, on the basis of their grant description; for remote spillovers, that proportion increased to one third. We also found that the NIH funding institutes whose remits were most closely related to HIV/AIDS were less likely to produce spillovers than others. We discuss implications for theory and policy.

Whether research funding is targetable is one of the central unresolved questions of science policy. A particular question is how often research aimed at understanding one disease or problem spills over to others. This has been a perennial topic of debate at the world's largest single funding body of biomedical research, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Critics of the agency's priority-setting process have repeatedly called for better alignment between funding and disease burden, and patient advocates for specific diseases for more funding for their causes. In response, opponents of planning have argued that research in one area frequently leads to advances in others. In this study, we provide new evidence to inform these debates by examining the extent to which research funding (grants) in one scientific or disease area leads to research findings (publications) in another. We used the NIH's Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) to identify categories for NIH grants awarded between 2008 and 2016. We applied machine-learning to map text to these categories and use this model to categorize publications resulting from these grants. We categorized over 1.2 million publications, resulting from over 90,000 grants. We found that 70 % of the publications have at least one RCDC category not in its grant, which we termed ‘unexpected’ categories. On average, 40 % of categories assigned to a publication were unexpected. After adjusting for similarity across some of the RCDC categories by empirically clustering the categories, we found 58 % of the publications had at least one unexpected category and, on average, 33 % of publication categories were unexpected. Our results suggest that disease-orientation and clinical research were less likely to be associated with spillovers. Grants resulting from targeted requests for applications were more likely to result in publications with unexpected categories, though the magnitude of the differences was relatively small.

Adopting a practice-based approach informed by structuration theory, we report on the establishment of the MP3-path from 1997 to 2004 as a process of path constitution that introduced a new path-dependent patterning among the practices in the field of recorded music. This case helps us elaborate a practice-based and more integrated theory of path constitution that incorporates both the production of path dependence and the release from the limitations that path dependence imposes on choice. The empirical investigation rests on a mixed-methods approach combining topic modeling with longitudinal historical research. By distinguishing between practices and entrepreneurial initiatives, we explain how a critical path-release juncture emancipated practices from existing path dependence (the CD-path), which was followed by a path-creation juncture that triggered the production of a new MP3-path. We synthesize the concepts and findings to develop an integrated model of path constitution and thereby contribute to the literature on path dependence.