ASSESSMENT OF RISK WHEN CONTRACT CROPS ARE INCLUDED AMONG OTHER CROP ALTERNATIVES

Crop Production/Industries, Risk and Uncertainty,

Creativity for Invention Insights: Corporate Strategies and Opportunities for Public Entrepreneurship

This paper introduces and describes the invention-insight sample space and uses it to describe the creative process of discovering invention insights—the essential combinations of elements of knowledge to envision the basic working configurations of inventions, the working ideas for new technologies. Evidence about invention insights and about corporate strategies to promote them is viewed in the context of the paper’s description of the invention-insight discovery process. Then that description is used (1) to identify a novel new opportunity—initiation of policies to stimulate invention insights that directly combine unusually large numbers of knowledge elements—for public sector entrepreneurship to speed the pace of technological progress and the opening up of altogether new areas of science and technology, and (2) to delimit the appropriate form of policy—promotion of competition and the free exchange of ideas—to exploit the opportunity. With sufficient uncertainty in the search for insights, pre-invention-insight ideas in themselves should ideally be freed from the restrictions of intellectual property

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Line of Business Program and Innovation Research

This paper examines how the resources of the Line of Business (LB) Program of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) leveraged academic research to develop understanding of science and technology policy and to point to new directions for both research and policy. The paper provides an overview and discussion of the birth and death of the FTC LB Program and its unique LB data, the innovation research using the LB data, and the legacy of the program

Innovation Rivalry: Theory and Empirics

This paper develops the theory of a U relation between seller concentration and R&D investment and integrates the new theory with the traditional expectation of an inverted-U relation. The paper illustrates the U relation, and the integrated U and inverted-U relations, for a single type of R&D performed in most industries, exploiting differences in the degree of structural competition across industries while admitting little if any variation in the type of R&D

Standards and the Incentives for Innovation

We model the economics of the effects of standards on incentives for innovative investment. We use survey data from industrial respondents to parameterize our model, allowing us to explain and predict effects of technology standards on investment in the development of technology and thereby assess the benefits and costs of technology standards in a market equilibrium setting. Having parameterized the model with the responses of industry to our survey, we can also describe the differences in effects of standards for different types of firms and for different types of industrial research, and we can simulate the effects of stronger or weaker intellectual property (IP) protection, using the industrial responses to answer the question of how the opposing effects from changes in IP protection on balance affect innovative investments. We find that the net effects of standards for IP protection are positive, increasing innovative investments and increasing their private and social value. Prepared for th

Standards and Innovation: US Public/Private Partnerships to Support Technology-based Economic Growth

This paper examines how strategic alliances to create and use standards affect economic growth and development. The explanation of the link from standards to economic growth and development is through the effects of standards on the incentives to perform industrial research and development (R&D). We examine product standards, metrology traceable to national and international standards, and regulatory standards to address negative externalities. The paper develops a theoretical explanation for the link from standards to growth, survey/interview-guides to gather information from industrial R&D experts about the explanation, and case-study evidence about the explanation. We discuss the standard-setting process and explain it entails strategic alliances among firms and with government involvement. Case studies of R&D projects in firms and in a national laboratory support the belief that standards implemented via strategic alliances leverage economic growth and development

The Entrepreneur’s Idea and Outside Finance: Theory and Evidence about Entrepreneurial Roles

We study the problem faced by the entrepreneur seeking outside support to turn an entrepreneurial idea into a successful innovation—specifically a successful technological innovation resulting from research and development. The paper develops and tests the hypothesis that as an entrepreneur’s innovative idea becomes more complex, the entrepreneur will find it more difficult to obtain outside finance and then outside support more generally for the commercialization of the idea. Consequently, the entrepreneur will be more likely to take on additional roles beyond providing the essential idea. The evidence supports the hypothesis that, other things being the same, an entrepreneur with a more complex idea will have greater difficulty obtaining outside finance and will be more likely to take on the additional roles of development, production, marketing and distribution that are necessary for successful innovation

Barriers Inhibiting Industry from Partnering with Universities: Evidence from the Advanced Technology Program

A small sample of 38 Advanced Technology Projects funded between 1993 and 1996 are surveyed to explore the reasons for university non-participation, or, in the cases where they did participate, whether the partnerships encountered any difficulties from their participation. 32 percent report that intellectual property issues were an insurmountable barrier to university participation. Such barriers are more likely when the ATP share of funding is high and when the expected duration of the research is relatively short. They are also somewhat more likely for projects involving chemical technology, and when industrial participants have had previous experience with universities as research partners. These difficulties over IP may arise because the cultures in the two institutional forms differ, or because the original ATP guidelines do not recognize the existence of the Bayh-Dole Act (which grants universities title to inventions made by their employees using outside funding).

Universities as Research Partners

Universities are a key institution in the US innovation system and an important aspect of their involvement is the role they play in Private-Public Partnering activities. This study seeks to gain a better understanding of the performance of university-industry research partnerships using a sample survey of pre-commercial research projects funded the U.S. government's Advanced Technology Program. Although results must be interpreted cautiously due to the small size of the sample, the study finds that projects with university involvement tend to be in areas involving "new" science and therefore experience more difficulty and delay but also are more likely not to be aborted prematurely. We interpret this finding to imply that universities are contributing to basic research awareness and insight among the partners in ATP-funded projects.