Increasing the “truth per dollar” of money spent on science is one legitimate long-run goal of the economics of science. But before this goal can be achieved, we need to increase our knowledge of the successes and failures of past and current reward structures of science. This essay reviews what economists have learned about the behavior of scientists and the reward structure of science. One important use of such knowledge will be to help policy-makers create a reward structure that is (...) more efficient in the future. (shrink)

The innovation systems approach has swiftly spread out worldwide in the last three decades and stood as an important framework for policy-making in the fields of science, technology, and innovation. At the same time, there have been serious and untreated concerns in the literature about the theoretical soundness of this approach. Our discussion in this paper is based on the belief that a detailed analysis on epistemological foundations of the approach could shed a judgmental light on the aforementioned concerns. To (...) provide that analysis, we reconstructed and studied the nature and evolution of innovation systems approach as a case of conceptual revolution against the more established traditions in economics of innovation. Our analyses show that the rise of the systemic view of innovation include radical changes in conceptual structures pertaining to orthodox view of innovation. These developments also go so far as to include significant shifts in epistemological foundations of the old paradigm. These later shifts provide us with an epistemological base from which we can shelter the innovation systems approach from the hard criticisms rooted in a quasi-positivist point of view. That epistemological base also shows the path for the future development of the approach towards more robustness and precision. (shrink)

The Argumentwhile reconizing that public sector research has long been managed by a wide variety of practices and techniques, this paper concentrates on the increasingly important role that patents are playing in the management and regulation of public sector research. It argues that as a specific form of technology, patents play a significant and growing role in facilitating the management of the scientific object and can also be seen as a particular instance of governmentality. More specifically, it argues that patents (...) have had an important impact on the culture and political ecomomy of science. In this sence patents can be seen not only as a legal regime that provides limited property rights over technical information but also as a sophisticated tool of discipline and control that is used to regulate and manage public sector research. The paper suggests that with the increasing use of patents as a means of governing science, we are witnessing the growing juridification of science, the intervention of the law into an arena it hitherto largely ignored. (shrink)

An incrementalist view of the R&Dprocess is developed, according to which R&D consists of informed trial and error. One way of avoiding expensive mistakes is to avoid choices within the R&D program that are highly sensitive to a particular scientific claim, because a great deal of time and money may have been spent to no avail should the claim turn out to befalse. The incremental view of R&D therefore entails that no choice within any R&D program is sensitive to any (...) scientific claim made at the time. Two tests are presented, antiseptic surgery and the first atomic pile, both of which confirm the incrementalist thesis. (shrink)

Inspired by the recent rediscovery of work of Schumpeter in science and policymaking the author reviews and appraises Schumpeterian theory and that of his followers in innovation studies. Although Schumpeter’s vision suffers from some defects, I argue that there is more to learn from this author than his well-known idea of “creative destruction”. In particular, Schumpeter’s view on innovation policy is something that may have vital relevance to today’s increasingly policy-dominated world. We therefore conclude that besides his key ideas on (...) innovation-led development also his policy view should be regarded as a significant legacy in innovation studies. (shrink)

Technological change is widely studied in economic discourse, dominated by an “industrial perspective” in which scientific and engineering advances are categorized by, and analyzed in the context of, industrial classifications. The present study compares this perspective with the alternative approach of studying the effects of scientific advances onproducts (goods and services) in the context of the functions those products serve. Using a function-based classification scheme, data on the economic effects of scientific advances are developed from articles appearing in business journals. (...) These data present a different picture of evolutionary economic change, which may shed additional light on its causality. (shrink)

The discovery and development of new therapeutics has always been central to improving health worldwide. However, there is ongoing concern regarding the current state of medical innovation. Output from the pharmaceutical industry has been criticized for not being “transformative,” that is, offering substantial improvements in patient outcomes over existing therapeutics. While the cost of drug development continues to rise, breakthrough therapies remain elusive and one half of Phase 3 studies fail. Venture capital, a traditional source of funding for new breakthrough (...) biomedical innovations, has decreased investment by 30% in the biotechnology and medical device sectors from 2007 to 2013. Stakeholders question whether the new drugs approved each year by the FDA —many criticized as marginal improvements over existing therapies — justify the enormous investment. (shrink)

Much has been written about the linear model of innovation. While it may have been the dominant model used to explain technological innovation for decades, alternatives did exist. One such alternative—generally discussed as being the exact opposite of the linear model—is the demand-pull model. Beginning in the 1960s, people from different disciplines started looking at technological innovation from a demand rather than a supply perspective. The theory was that technological innovation is stimulated by market demand rather than by scientific discoveries. (...) However, few traces of the demand-pull model remain in the literature today. This article looks at what happened to the demand-pull model from a historical perspective, at three points in time: birth, crystallization, and death. It suggests that the idea of demand as a factor explaining technological innovation emerged in the 1960s, was formalized into models in the 1970-1980s, then got integrated into “multidimensional” models. From then on, the demand-pull model disappeared from the literature, existing only as an object of the past, like the linear model of innovation. (shrink)

The history of innovation as a category is dominated by economists and by the contribution of J. A. Schumpeter. This paper documents the contribution of a neglected but influential author, the American sociologist William F. Ogburn. Over a period of more than 30 years, Ogburn developed pioneering ideas on three dimensions of technological innovation: origins, diffusion, and effects. He also developed the first conceptual framework for innovation studies—based on the concept of cultural lags—which led to studying and forecasting the impacts (...) of technological innovation on society. All in all, Ogburn has been as important to the sociology of technology as Robert K. Merton has been to the sociology of science and Schumpeter to the economics of technological innovation. (shrink)

J. Schumpeter is a key figure, even a seminal one, on technological innovation. Most economists who study technological innovation refer to Schumpeter and his pioneering role in introducing innovation into economic studies. However, despite having brought forth the concept of innovation in economic theory, Schumpeter provided few if any analyses of the process of innovation itself. This paper suggests that the origin of systematic studies on technological innovation owes its existence to the economist W. Rupert Maclaurin from MIT. In the (...) 1940s and 1950s, Maclaurin developed Schumpeter’s ideas, analyzing technological innovation as a process composed of several stages or steps, and proposed a theory of technological innovation, later called the linear model of innovation. The paper also argues that Maclaurin constructed one of the first taxonomies for measuring technological innovation. (shrink)