Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Inventors (But Never Asked): Evidence from the PatVal-EU Survey

Based on a survey of the inventors of 9,017 European patented inventions, this paper provides new information about the characteristics of European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of the patents

Interdisciplinarity and research on local issues: evidence from a developing country

This paper explores the relationship between interdisciplinarity and research pertaining to local issues. Using Colombian publications from 1991 until 2011 in the Web of Science, we investigate the relationship between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the local orientation of the articles. We find that a higher degree of interdisciplinarity in a publication is associated with a greater emphasis on Colombian issues. In particular, our results suggest that research that combines cognitively disparate disciplines, what we refer to as distal interdisciplinarity, tends to be associated with more local focus of research. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of policies aiming to foster the local socio-economic impact of research in developing countries.Comment: 24 page

Everything you Always Wanted to Know about Inventors (but Never Asked): Evidence from the PatVal-EU Survey

By drawing information from a survey of inventors of 9,017 European patents (PatVal-EU), this paper provides novel and detailed data about the characteristics of the European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations among researchers and institutions, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of the patents. This is important information as the unavailability of direct indicators has limited the scope and depth of the empirical studies on innovation.

Bridging academia and industry: how geographic hubs connect university science and corporate technology

Innovative firms rely increasingly on academic science, yet they exploit only a small fraction of all academic discoveries. Which discoveries in academia do firms build upon? We posit that hubs play the role of bridges between academic science and corporate technology. Tracking citations from patents to approximately 10 million academic articles, we find that hubs facilitate the flow of academic science into corporate inventions in two ways. First, hub-based discoveries in academia are of higher quality and are more applied. Second, firms—in particular young, innovative, science-oriented ones—pay disproportionate attention to hub-based discoveries. We address concerns regarding unobserved heterogeneity by confirming the role of firms’ attention to hub-based science in a set of 147 simultaneous discoveries. Importantly, hubs not only facilitate localized knowledge flow but also extend the geographic reach of academic science, attracting the attention of distant firms.http://10.0.5.7/mnsc.2019.3385Published versio

Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Inventors (But Never Asked): Evidence from the PatVal-EU Survey

Based on a survey of the inventors of 9,017 European patented inventions, this paper provides new information about the characteristics of European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of the patents.inventor; patent; incentives; innovation; patent system; patent value

Interdisciplinarity and research on local issues: evidence from a developing country

This paper examines the role of interdisciplinarity on research pertaining to local issues. Using Colombian publications from 1991 until 2011 in the Web of Science, we investigate the relationship between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the local orientation of the articles. We find that a higher degree of interdisciplinarity in a publication is associated with a greater emphasis on local issues. In particular, our results support the view that research that combines cognitively disparate disciplines, what we refer to as distal interdisciplinarity, is associated with more local focus of research. We discuss the policy implications of these results in the context of national research assessments targeting excellence and socio-economic impact

The Distant Horizon: investigating the relationship between social sciences academic research and game development

Research in the social sciences devotes a great amount of attention to investigating the impact of video games on the individual and on society. However, results generated by this research often fail to inform game development. The present study investigated the outreach of research conducted by the academic community by interviewing 30 game developers and 14 researchers, highlighting critical aspects in the relationship between game research and game industry. Specifically, we found that the difference in priorities, speed cycles, and dissemination practices between these two contexts hinder communication. Subsequently, we carried out a focus group for a set of developers and researchers (N=6) with the aim of eliciting recommendation for improving communication between academics and developers. Among the recommendations to emerge were calls to diversify dissemination channels, promote joint conferences and develop research-production partnerships. It was felt such measures could strengthen the influence of research results outside the academic community

Conceptualizing the Role of Geographical Proximity in Project Based R&D Networks: A Literature Survey

Empirical evidence shows that research is being carried out more in cooperation or in collaboration with others, and the networks described by these collaborative research activities are becoming more and more complex. This phenomenon brings about new strands of research questions and opens up a different research context in the area of geography of innovation. The recent set of literature addressing these new issues shows a high degree of variation in terms of focus, approaches and methodology. Hence to elucidate the relationship between networks and geography it is crucial to have a review them. In this regard, this study focuses on a particular type of networks, namely, project based R&D networks and aims at describing the state-of-the-art in explaining the specificity of geography in formation and evolution of such networks. Towards this aim, we framed the discussion along four lenses: the specificity of geography in partner choice, in successful execution of the collaboration, in the resulting innovation performance both at the organizational and regional level, and the spatio-temporal evolution of networks. The overview provided by the survey is suggestive regarding the theorization of geography and network relationship, and informative regarding the issues demanding further research effort, and promising extensions.

Measurement and Explanation of the Intensity of Co Co-publication in Scientific Research: An Analysis at the Laboratory Level

In this paper we study networks of academic researchers on an aggregated laboratory scale. We propose a measurement of the intensity of cooperation between laboratories, and attempt to account for its intra- and inter-town variations in relation to a number of characteristics: geographic distance between laboratories, specialization of laboratories, size of their scientific community, productivity, quality of their publications and international openness. Cooperative relations are identified on the basis of data on co-publication. These data concern French physicists from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), between 1992 and 1997.