Keyvan Vakili

Collaborative Promotion of Technology Standards and the Impact on Innovation, Industry Structure, and Organizational Capabilities: Evidence from Modern Patent Pools

This study explores the impact of modern patent pools—inter-organizational collaborative arrangements for promoting the adoption of technology standards—on the rate of follow-on innovations based on pooled technologies, the vertical structure of associated industries, and organizational capabilities of noncollaborating firms. On one hand, the formation of modern pools can boost follow-on innovation by lowering the search, negotiation, and licensing costs associated with pooled standards. On the other hand, modern pools may decrease the incentives to invest in follow-on innovations because of cannibalization risks and grant-back provisions. To the extent that modern pools succeed in establishing a dominant standard, their collaborative nature and their reliance on markets for technology can reduce technological uncertainty and appropriation hazards, hence triggering vertical disintegration in related industries. Moreover, by establishing a dominant standard, modern pools can effectively diminish the relati...

Progress in human embryonic stem cell research in the United States between 2001 and 2010

On August 9th, 2001, the federal government of the United States announced a policy restricting federal funds available for research on human embryonic stem cell (hESCs) out of concern for the “vast ethical mine fields” associated with the creation of embryos for research purposes. Until the policy was repealed on March 9th, 2009, no U.S. federal funds were available for research on hESCs extracted after August 9, 2001, and only limited federal funds were available for research on a subset of hESC lines that had previously been extracted. This paper analyzes how the 2001 U.S. federal funding restrictions influenced the quantity and geography of peer-reviewed journal publications on hESC. The primary finding is that the 2001 policy did not have a significant aggregate effect on hESC research in the U.S. After a brief lag in early 2000s, U.S. hESC research maintained pace with other areas of stem cell and genetic research. The policy had several other consequences. First, it was tied to increased hESC research funding within the U.S. at the state level, leading to concentration of related activities in a relatively small number of states. Second, it stimulated increased collaborative research between US-based scientists and those in countries with flexible policies toward hESC research (including Canada, the U.K., Israel, China, Spain, and South Korea). Third, it encouraged independent hESC research in countries without restrictions.

Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast- and Slow-paced Domains*:

Using the impact of the Soviet Union’s collapse on the performance of theoretical mathematicians as a natural experiment, we attempt to resolve the controversy in prior research on whether specialists or generalists have superior creative performance. While many have highlighted generalists’ advantage due to access to a wider set of knowledge components, others have underlined the benefits that specialists can derive from their deep expertise. We argue that this disagreement might be partly driven by the fact that the pace of change in a knowledge domain shapes the relative return from being a specialist or a generalist. We show that generalist scientists performed best when the pace of change was slower and their ability to draw from diverse knowledge domains was an advantage in the field, but specialists gained advantage when the pace of change increased and their deeper expertise allowed them to use new knowledge created at the knowledge frontier. We discuss and test the roles of cognitive mechanisms and of competition for scarce resources. Specifically, we show that specialists became more desirable collaborators when the pace of change was faster, but when the pace of change was slower, generalists were more sought after as collaborators. Overall, our results highlight trade-offs associated with specialization for creative performance.

An Inside Look: Modeling Heterogeneity in the Organization of Scientific Work

Prior studies of academic science have largely focused on researchers in life sciences or engineering. However, while academic researchers often work under similar institutions, norms, and incentives, they vary greatly in how they organize their research efforts across different scientific domains. This heterogeneity, in turn, has important implications for innovation policy, the relationship between industry and academia, the scientific labor market, and the perceived deficit in the relevance of social sciences and humanities research. To understand this heterogeneity, we model scientists as publication-maximizing agents, identifying two distinct organizational patterns that are optimal under different parameters. When the net productivity of research staff (e.g., PhD students and postdocs) is positive, the funded research model with an entrepreneurial scientist and a large team dominates. When the costs of research staff exceed their productivity benefits, the hands-on research approach is optimal. The model implies significant heterogeneity across the two modes of organizing in research funding, supply of scientific workforce, team size, publication output, and stratification patterns over time. Exploratory empirical analysis finds consistent patterns of time allocation and publication in a prior survey of faculty in U.S. universities. Using data from an original survey, we also find causal effects consistent with the model’s prediction on how negative shocks to research staff—due to visa or health problems, for example—differentially impact research output under the two modes of organization.

When Collaboration Bridges Institutions: The Impact of Industry Collaboration on Academic Productivity

Prior research suggests that academic scientists who collaborate with firms may experience lower publication rates in their collaborative lines of work due to industry’s insistence on intellectual property protection through patenting or secrecy. In contrast, we posit that university–industry collaboration can sometimes foster specialization and boost academic contribution to open science. Specifically, research lines with both scientific and commercial potential (i.e., in Pasteur’s quadrant) provide an opportunity for a productive division of tasks between academic scientists and their industry counterparts, whereby the former focus on exploiting the scientific opportunities and the latter focus on the commercial ones. The main empirical challenge of examining this proposition is that research projects that involve industry collaborators may be qualitatively different from those that do not. To address this issue, we exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries where multiple scientists make roughly the same discovery around the same time. Following a simultaneous discovery, we compare the follow-on research output of academic scientists who collaborated with industry on the discovery with that of academic scientists who did not. We find that academic scientists with industry collaborators produced more follow-on publications and fewer follow-on patents than did academic scientists without industry collaborators. This effect is particularly salient when the research line has important commercial implications and when the industry partner is an established firm.

The Research Money Can't Buy: The Impact of Funding on Scientists’ Research Behavior

While corporations increasingly rely on academic science and greater financial resources are directed to academic research, we know little about how external funding affects the research direction and behavior of academic scientists. We explore this question by exploiting the unexpected decline in federal funding for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research in the United States in 2001. We find little evidence that the policy change had a significant effect on U.S. scientists’ hESC output. However, U.S. scientists experienced a relative decrease in their output in other stem cell subfields. They were also more likely to move from academia to industry following the policy change. These results provide novel insights into how scientists strategically respond to funding policies to maintain their focus on research lines perceived more promising by their peers. We discuss how misaligned financial and reputational incentives may have important unintended consequences for those funding academic science.

High on Creativity: The Impact of Liberalization Policies on Creative Outcomes

This paper investigates the impact of liberalization policies on creative outcomes. We use two different proxies for liberalization policies: legalization of medicinal marijuana and legalization of same-sex unions and domestic partnerships; and two different measures of creative outcomes: the number of patents and gross domestic product of artistic production. Our empirical strategy exploits the staggered timing of legalization policies across different states in the United States. Our findings show that after controlling for state-level R&D and education-specific expenditures, liberalization policies increased artistic production by 4% to 7% and patenting by 10% to 16% at the state level. Further analysis suggests that the impact on patenting cannot be solely explained by the inter-state movement of inventors after policy changes. Interestingly, we find that while the total number of inventors in treatment states increases, the net inter-state flow of more prolific inventors goes down after the enactment...

Strategic Patenting and the Tragedy of Anticommons: A Closer Look at Firms’ Patenting Behavior

Prior research postulates an inconclusive causal effect of fragmentation of property rights on firms’ patenting behavior. On one hand, studies that emanate from concepts such as “patent thickets�? and “the tragedy of anticommons�? suggest that a dense overlapping set of fragmented property rights can result in technological stagnation and, hence, in a decline in firms’ patenting rate. On the other hand, research derived from such notions as “strategic patenting�? argues that firms facing a fragmented external technology market will engage in patent proliferation strategies. In this paper, I develop an integrated theoretical model that captures the main features of both arguments. Indeed, the model posits that firms are more likely to engage in patent proliferation strategies when their technologies draw on patents assigned to a disperse set of outside entities. However, as the overlapping claims of these external right holders increase, the expected infringement costs associated with a patent proliferation strategy may exceed its benefits. The model is empirically tested using panel data of patenting behavior of public firms in the semiconductors industry from 1980 to 1999. The empirical results support the model predictions.