Philip Shapira

Follow the money

What was the impact of the nanotechnology funding boom of the past ten years? Philip Shapira and Jue Wang have scrutinized the literature to find out.

The Theory and Practice of Innovation Policy

This comprehensive Handbook explores the interactions between the practice, policy, and theory of innovation. The goal is twofold: to increase insight into this dynamic process, searching for options to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of both policy and innovative practice, and to identify conceptual or empirical lacunae and questions that can guide future research. The Handbook is a joint project from 24 prominent scholars in the field, and although each chapter reveals the insights of its respective authors, two overarching theoretical perspectives provide unique coherence and consistency throughout.

China---US scientific collaboration in nanotechnology: patterns and dynamics

This paper examines the rapid growth of China in the field of nanotechnology and the rise of collaboration between China and the US in this emerging domain. Chinese scientific papers in nanotechnology are analyzed to indicate overall trends, leading fields and the most prolific institutions. Patterns of China–US nanotechnology paper co-authorship are examined over the period 1990–2009, with an analysis of how these patterns have changed over time. The paper combines bibliometric analysis and science mapping. We find rapid development in the number of China–US co-authored nanotechnology papers as well as structural changes in array of collaborative nanotechnology sub-fields. Implications for both China and the US of this evolving relationship are discussed.

Funding acknowledgement analysis: an enhanced tool to investigate research sponsorship impacts: the case of nanotechnology

There is increasing interest in assessing how sponsored research funding influences the development and trajectory of science and technology. Traditionally, linkages between research funding and subsequent results are hard to track, often requiring access to separate funding or performance reports released by researchers or sponsors. Tracing research sponsorship and output linkages is even more challenging when researchers receive multiple funding awards and collaborate with a variety of differentially-sponsored research colleagues. This article presents a novel bibliometric approach to undertaking funding acknowledgement analysis which links research outputs with their funding sources. Using this approach in the context of nanotechnology research, the article probes the funding patterns of leading countries and agencies including patterns of cross-border research sponsorship. We identify more than 91,500 nanotechnology articles published worldwide during a 12-month period in 2008–2009. About 67% of these publications include funding acknowledgements information. We compare articles reporting funding with those that do not (for reasons that may include reliance on internal core-funding rather than external awards as well as omissions in reporting). While we find some country and field differences, we judge that the level of reporting of funding sources is sufficiently high to provide a basis for analysis. The funding acknowledgement data is used to compare nanotechnology funding policies and programs in selected countries and to examine their impacts on scientific output. We also examine the internationalization of research funding through the interplay of various funding sources at national and organizational levels. We find that while most nanotechnology funding is nationally-oriented, internationalization and knowledge exchange does occur as researchers collaborate across borders. Our method offers a new approach not only in identifying the funding sources of publications but also in feasibly undertaking large-scale analyses across scientific fields, institutions and countries.

Current practices in the evaluation of US industrial modernization programs

Abstract The expansion of public policies and programs to promote the technological modernization of small and mid-sized manufacturing enterprises in the United States has been accompanied by an increased interest in assessing the effectiveness and impact of these initiatives. This article examines current practices used in the evaluation of US industrial modernization programs at state and national levels, drawing on interviews with program managers, site visits, and scrutiny of available studies. Issues related to the meaning of evaluation in the context of industrial modernization, the scale and scope of existing programs, and the definition of metrics are considered. A series of evaluation approaches, methods, and studies are identified and reviewed, including the role of program monitoring, customer valuation, external reviews, economic impact studies, control groups, and assessments of best practice. The authors address the use of evaluation results and discuss key challenges and directions relevant to the development of more robust evaluation procedures.

Developing nanotechnology in Latin America

This article investigates the development of nanotechnology in Latin America with a particular focus on Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. Based on data for nanotechnology research publications and patents and suggesting a framework for analyzing the development of R&D networks, we identify three potential strategies of nanotechnology research collaboration. Then, we seek to identify the balance of emphasis upon each of the three strategies by mapping the current research profile of those four countries. In general, we find that they are implementing policies and programs to develop nanotechnologies but differ in their collaboration strategies, institutional involvement, and level of development. On the other hand, we find that they coincide in having a modest industry participation in research and a low level of commercialization of nanotechnologies.

Is there a shift to “active nanostructures”?

It has been suggested that an important transition in the long-run trajectory of nanotechnology development is a shift from passive to active nanostructures. Such a shift could present different or increased societal impacts and require new approaches for risk assessment. An active nanostructure “changes or evolves its state during its operation,” according to the National Science Foundation’s (2006) Active Nanostructures and Nanosystems grant solicitation. Active nanostructure examples include nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), nanomachines, self-healing materials, targeted drugs and chemicals, energy storage devices, and sensors. This article considers two questions: (a) Is there a “shift” to active nanostructures? (b) How can we characterize the prototypical areas into which active nanostructures may emerge? We build upon the NSF definition of active nanostructures to develop a research publication search strategy, with a particular intent to distinguish between passive and active nanotechnologies. We perform bibliometric analyses and describe the main publication trends from 1995 to 2008. We then describe the prototypes of research that emerge based on reading the abstracts and review papers encountered in our search. Preliminary results suggest that there is a sharp rise in active nanostructures publications in 2006, and this rise is maintained in 2007 and through to early 2008. We present a typology that can be used to describe the kind of active nanostructures that may be commercialized and regulated in the future.

Identifying creative research accomplishments: methodology and results for nanotechnology and human genetics

Motivated by concerns about the organizational and institutional conditions that foster research creativity in science, we focus on how creative research can be defined, operationalized, and empirically identified. A functional typology of research creativity is proposed encompassing theoretical, methodological and empirical developments in science. We then apply this typology through a process of creative research event identification in the fields of nanotechnology and human genetics in Europe and the United States, combining nominations made by several hundred experts with data on prize winners. Characteristics of creative research in the two respective fields are analyzed, and there is a discussion of broader insights offered by our approach.

Regional development and interregional collaboration in the growth of nanotechnology research in China

China is becoming a leading nation in terms of its share of the world’s publications in the emerging nanotechnology domain. This paper demonstrates that the international rise of China’s position in nanotechnology has been underwritten by the emergence of a series of regional hubs of nanotechnology R&D activity within the country. We develop a unique database of Chinese nanotechnology articles covering the period 1990 to mid-2006 to identify the regional distribution of nanotechnology research in China. To build this database, a new approach was developed to clean and standardize the geographical allocation of Chinese publication records. We then analyze the data to understand the regional development of nanotechnology research in China over our study period and to map interregional and international research collaboration linkages. We find that the geographical distribution of China’s domestic nanotechnology research is characterized by regional imbalance, with most of the leading regions located in eastern China, including not only Beijing and Shanghai but also a series of other new regional hubs. There is much less development of nanotechnology research in central and western China. Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong are among the leading Chinese regions for international nanotechnology research collaboration. Other Chinese nanotechnology regions are less focused on international collaboration, although they have developed domestic interregional collaborations. Although new regional research hubs have emerged in the nanotechnology domain, the paper notes that their concentration in eastern China reinforces existing imbalances in science and technology capabilities in China, and in turn this may further reinforce the dominant position of eastern China in the commercialization of new technologies such as nanotechnology.

The emergence of social science research on nanotechnology

This article examines the development of social science literature focused on the emerging area of nanotechnology. It is guided by the exploratory proposition that early social science work on emerging technologies will draw on science and engineering literature on the technology in question to frame its investigative activities, but as the technologies and societal investments in them progress, social scientists will increasingly develop and draw on their own body of literature. To address this proposition the authors create a database of nanotechnology-social science literature by merging articles from the Web of Science’s Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index with articles from Scopus. The resulting database comprises 308 records. The findings suggest that there are multiple dimensions of cited literature and that social science citations of other social scientists’ works have increased since 2005.