Machine learning could improve innovation policy

Accepted manuscrip

Automation, research technology, and researchers’ trajectories: evidence from computer science and electrical engineering

We examine how the introduction of a technology that automates research tasks influences the rate and type of researchers’ knowledge production. To do this, we leverage the unanticipated arrival of an automating motion-sensing research technology that occurred as a consequence of the introduction and subsequent hacking of the Microsoft Kinect system. To estimate whether this technology induces changes in the type of knowledge produced, we employ novel measures based on machine learning (topic modeling) techniques and traditional measures based on bibliometric indicators. Our analysis demonstrates that the shock associated with the introduction of Kinect increased the production of ideas and induced researchers to pursue ideas more diverse than and distant from their original trajectories. We find that this holds for both researchers who had published in motion-sensing research prior to the Kinect shock (within-area researchers) and those who did not (outside-area researchers), with the effects being stronger among outside-area researchers.Published versio

Measuring the direction of innovation: frontier tools in unassisted machine learning

NSF SciSIP grant, SES-1564368. - National Science FoundationOthe

Three Essays on the Impact of Knowledge Accumulation on the Process of Knowledge Creation with a Focus on Collaboration

The cumulative nature of knowledge constantly alters the innovative landscape and thus the process of knowledge creation. In this dissertation, I explore the impact of cumulativeness on individual-level collaboration as it shapes the production of new ideas. I focus on two main influencing factors: conditions of access to knowledge and knowledge accumulation as it leads to increased specialization. This is important since the ability to build on knowledge influences the evolution of innovation trajectories.In the first study, I explore the composition of collaboration and the impact of a researcher level of expertise on the type of knowledge created. Leveraging a natural experiment, the launch of Microsoft Kinect, which triggered an unanticipated reduction in the cost of motion-sensing technology, I examine how individuals respond to opportunities for knowledge creation opened by a change in conditions of access to knowledge. Despite growing emphasis on the importance of specialists for knowledge creation, I identify generalists - researchers with broader exposure to knowledge - as playing a particularly important role in the process of innovation with implications for the type of knowledge created. Specifically, generalists have a higher propensity than specialists to respond to opportunities for knowledge creation that span knowledge areas and play a central role in coordinating collaboration between specialists required to execute on the opportunities. In the second study, I focus on the impact of increased specialization due to knowledge accumulation on the rate of collaboration. The knowledge burden hypothesis - that reaching the knowledge frontier is progressively costly due to knowledge accumulation and results in increasing specialization and collaboration - is one of several theories advanced to explain the widely documented observation that researcher team size is increasing over time. I exploit a natural experiment, the collapse of the USSR as an exogenous shock to the knowledge frontier in theoretical mathematics, to provide results of a first causal test in support of the knowledge burden hypothesis. This identification exercise is important since this hypothesis leads to policy implications that do not apply to other explanations of increases in team size. Lastly, in the third study, I discuss the influence of collaboration and individual-level breadth and depth of expertise in potentially influencing the rate and direction of a big science project. A narrative on commercial quantum computing innovation, a controversial contemporaneous endeavour, suggests the influential role of an entrepreneurial venture coordinating large-scale collaboration to exploit an opportunity at the intersection of knowledge areas.Ph.D

DS_10.1177_0001839218793384 – Supplemental material for Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast- and Slow-paced Domains*

<p>Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0001839218793384 for Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast- and Slow-paced Domains* by Florenta Teodoridis, Michaël Bikard and Keyvan Vakili in Administrative Science Quarterly</p