Science and profit: Essays on the biotechnology industry.

Following the opening three chapters, which survey the literature related to knowledge, economic growth and firm behavior, I focus on the biotechnology industry to understand how firms translate basic scientific ideas into profitable ventures. I find that this industry is characterized by two unique stylized facts: first, firms publish the results of their scientific research openly in peer reviewed journals, and two, they collaborate with universities quite intensively. I explore the private-public nature of biotechnology innovation in three separate papers. In my first paper, I find that collaborative research with academics improves research quality for biotechnology firms. My results indicated that biotechnology firms seek alliances with high status academics with established research reputations so as to gain publication in highly ranked journals which is one measure of research quality. One of the major policy implications of my paper was that support for public science should be strengthened and collaboration across the private-public divide should also be encouraged. However, collaboration should not be conflated with co-option or appropriation of roles, i.e., the public sector should not be encouraged to emulate private sector functions. A strong independent public science nexus is crucial for private biotech firms, otherwise valuable signals of research quality may be compromised (as we shall see below). The results of my first paper elicited another important question - namely, why should firms publish the results of their research openly in the first place. I address this question in my second paper, by developing an open-science framework of innovation which argues that while R&D expenditures reveal the commitment of a firm's resources to innovation and patents record the completion of R&D activity, a firm's stock of scientific papers signals the quality of its innovative efforts. In biotechnology, quality of research is a valuable signal and publishing peer-reviewed articles allows firms to convince investors and potential collaborators of the worth of their ideas. This proposition is tested using unique data of U.K. biotechnology firms during the years 1988-2000. The findings indicate that research publications bring real financial gains to biotechnology firms and that, on average, publishing fourteen scientific papers in academic journals has approximately the same impact on a firm's market value as obtaining a single patent. Furthermore, papers which are highly cited, particularly by pharmaceutical firms, have a greater impact on market value. In a third theoretical paper. I show that biotechnology patents can be treated as credence goods - goods/services that require expert opinion to determine quality -- insofar as the market for biotechnology patents is characterized by an asymmetry of information between buyers and sellers. This informational asymmetry is a result of uncertainty associated with biotechnology patents. The chief causes of uncertainty are the legal substance of the patent document itself, the technological and commercial uncertainty associated with patent value and variable quality in screening new innovations at the patent office when granting patents. Despite these limitations, firms continue to patent in increasing numbers. Thus, the market has evolved mechanisms to more accurately ascertain "true" patent value. These mechanisms, that I label, credence verifiers, include publishing scientific papers in peer reviewed journals and the practice of clubbing patents in patent portfolios. Studying how the market ascertains the value of patents has implications for the theory and reality of patenting behavior; and by conceptualizing biotechnology patents as credence goods, this paper makes an interdisciplinary contribution (combining law and economics) to understanding the incentives that drive innovation

Congress UPV Proceedings of the 21ST International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators

This is the book of proceedings of the 21st Science and Technology Indicators Conference that took place in València (Spain) from 14th to 16th of September 2016. The conference theme for this year, ‘Peripheries, frontiers and beyond’ aimed to study the development and use of Science, Technology and Innovation indicators in spaces that have not been the focus of current indicator development, for example, in the Global South, or the Social Sciences and Humanities. The exploration to the margins and beyond proposed by the theme has brought to the STI Conference an interesting array of new contributors from a variety of fields and geographies. This year’s conference had a record 382 registered participants from 40 different countries, including 23 European, 9 American, 4 Asia-Pacific, 4 Africa and Near East. About 26% of participants came from outside of Europe. There were also many participants (17%) from organisations outside academia including governments (8%), businesses (5%), foundations (2%) and international organisations (2%). This is particularly important in a field that is practice-oriented. The chapters of the proceedings attest to the breadth of issues discussed. Infrastructure, benchmarking and use of innovation indicators, societal impact and mission oriented-research, mobility and careers, social sciences and the humanities, participation and culture, gender, and altmetrics, among others. We hope that the diversity of this Conference has fostered productive dialogues and synergistic ideas and made a contribution, small as it may be, to the development and use of indicators that, being more inclusive, will foster a more inclusive and fair world

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges