The fall of the innovation empire and its possible rise through open science – research output has been maintaining a steady-state progress despite the exponentially increasing cost. Meanwhile, economic growth from innovation has also been decreasing, attributed to the following:
- We have already picked the low-hanging fruits in science, making novel discoveries much more difficult to find.
- Incentives lead researchers away from high-risk, high reward breakthrough research.
- Tensions between the ideals of open science and the rewards from closed science.
The author recommends open science partnerships as a solution to reinvigorate research impact to the commercial realm.
Attention to Exploration: The Effect of Academic Entrepreneurship
on the Production of Scientific Knowledge – normally, we explore how scientific knowledge impacts academic entrepreneurship. In this study, they study the reverse and explore how entrepreneurship affects academics’ research directions. Through an attention-based perspective, they find that “entrepreneurship prompts a shift of an academic’s search toward new topics, which enables them to produce better and more impactful science.” This seems intuitive since engaging in more activities, leads to more collisions and higher chances of serendipitous interactions.
Fundamental elements in Technology Transfer: an in-depth analysis – lays out all the components that make up technology transfer. It’s a good reference just by the illustrative models that they have compiled from previous publications.
Training across the academy: The impact of R&D funding on graduate students – explores how receiving funding from the US NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship program affect the careers of the awardees. The researchers find that “the award increases degree completion, placement in a post-doctoral or academic research position, research productivity and impact, and network size.” Inspired by Caplan’s book The Case against Education, An interesting follow-up would be trying to understand whether these effects are from signalling, selection effects or from human capital development. I suspect that a large chunk of its benefits come from the cumulative halo effect that awardees receive from winning already a prestigious grant.