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This paper examines how the resources of the Line of Business (LB) Program of the US 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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Policy-makers have become increasingly aware that corporate R&D and innovation are the main drivers of an economy's competitiveness and growth. The widespread adoption of R&D targets has led researchers and analysts to pursue a deeper understanding of corporate R&D investment trends, drivers and impacts. This paper focuses on the main differences between the EU and the US in corporate R&D performance, and has three objectives: to review the literature on this subject, to introduce the papers in this special issue, and to discuss the possible implications for policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the institutional persistence of systems of national laboratories (SNLs) that unlike other public and private research organizations appear to have experienced only minor institutional shifts in recent years. Although national laboratories started as time-limited mission-oriented projects, most of them have remained in operation as continuously renewed multi-purpose organizations. By comparing the SNLs in Germany and the USA, this paper discusses the relationship between the system and the organizational level and concludes that incremental organizational rearrangements have enabled the institutional persistence of SNLs despite considerable changes in their political and funding environments. The paper applies recent advances in institutional theory and thus contributes to a better understanding of institutional change in path-dependent public R&D systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data on publication and collaboration patterns of USA and German research institutions in the field of global environmental change research. A dataset derived from the Web of Science showed that a marked rise in international co-authorship occurred in the period 1993-2002. However, this increase covered different world regions unevenly. Building on interview data, four factors driving international collaboration in this particular research area are identified which help to explain this specific trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1972 the United States Congress established the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) as a small analytical agency to become better informed about implications of new and emerging technologies. OTA’s principal products—technology assessments—were designed to inform congressional deliberations and debates about issues that involved science and technology dimensions but without recommending specific policy actions. OTA's unique governance by a bicameral and bipartisan board of House and Senate Members helped ensure that issues the agency addressed were tightly aligned with the congressional agenda and that assessments were undertaken with partisan and other stakeholder bias minimized. For 23 years OTA completed reports on virtually all science and technology subject faced by the Congress until the agency's annual appropriation of funds to operate was eliminated in 1995 as one of a series of budget austerity measures. This paper recaps the OTA experience and recent efforts to fill the gap since OTA's closure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Stem cell research has emerged as a state-level science and technology policy issue in recent years in the USA, with some states supporting research in the field and others choosing to restrict it. In this paper, we systematically explore the factors that are associated with US states’ adoptions of both supportive and restrictive stem cell policies. Our analysis identifies several factors, including partisan politics, existing morality policies, the strength of a state’s scientific community and the policy environment in neighboring states, which influence the adoption of state stem cell policies. Our paper aims to advance the science and technology policy literature by providing insight into the factors that push states to adopt science policies when economic development goals conflict with ethical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the distribution of federal academic research and development (R&D) funding in the context of fiscal federalism in financing academic R&D in the USA. The statistical results suggest that the distribution of federal academic R&D expenditures is primarily determined by states’ research capacity. In addition, a state’s political representation on congressional appropriations committees also has some significant but limited impact on its receipt of federal R&D support. The paper improves our understanding of fiscal federalism in supporting academic R&D in the USA, and provides empirical evidence related to the debate about the geographic distribution of federal funding of academic R&D. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The reasons behind the poor competitiveness of the European information technology (IT) industry vis- à-vis the US one have been discussed many times. This paper suggests that the long-term competitiveness of science-based industries is dependent on the ability of the underlying scientific base to support fast growing, turbulent and proliferating search regimes. This requires institutional mechanisms that foster severe selection of scholars from a large base, student and researcher mobility, and strong institutional complementarity with user industries. The paper compares the history of IT in the USA, Germany, the UK and France. Based on the analysis of the curriculum vitae of the top 1,000 scientists in computer science, it shows that these conditions were only met in the US academic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the existence and importance of financing constraints for R&D investments in large EU and US manufacturing companies over the period 2000-2007. The main results obtained by estimating error-correction equations suggest that the sensitivity of R&D investments to cash flow variations are important for European firms while US firms do not appear to be financially constrained. In terms of policy implications, these results suggest improving the conditions for access to external capital to finance R&D activities in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the impact of differences in practice between European and US national statistical offices when classifying R&D expenditure by industry. We examine the impact of these differences on the role of the services sector in the EU-US R&D investment gap. According to official statistics, services industries appear to explain nearly the entire EU-US R&D intensity gap (US services have much higher R&D intensities). We argue that this is almost entirely the result of a statistical artefact: EU statistical offices redistribute R&D in the services sector to the corresponding manufacturing sectors to a much greater extent than in the US. Thus the EU R&D deficit against the US does not specifically emanate from the services sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances our understanding of university spin-off creation and development in environments outside the high-tech cluster of the USA. It adopts a multi-level approach in its examination of this phenomenon in diverse institutional environments. In particular, units of analysis involving universities, technology transfer offices, spin-off firms, finance providers and individual entrepreneurs and teams are analysed. Policy implications are analysed and recommendations are proposed for current policy on university spin-offs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses principal-agent theory to examine the structure of 'science in policy.' It draws from one in-depth case study of regulatory science in the USA, the production of the biennial Report on Carcinogens by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, particularly NTP's review of saccharin as a potential human carcinogen in the late 1990s. The sources of data include extensive documentary review, observation of two public meetings of an advisory committee to NTP, and confidential interviews with seven of nine members of that advisory committee. The paper elaborates on the environment that precipitated Congress's need for a reliable agent, in the creation of NTP as an intermediary to serve as that agent, in the articulation of an explicit set of terms for the performance of that contract, and in the shirking behavior that agents engaged in, despite such precautions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Orphan Drug Act (ODA) was an historic attempt to stimulate the development of drugs for rare diseases, intended to help bring to the market drugs for diseases that the pharmaceutical industry might otherwise not have had the financial incentives to pursue. While the intended effects of this regulatory stimulus on innovation are widely analyzed, the unintended ones remain unexplored. Thus, the objective of this paper is to analyze and conceptualize the impact of a relevant regulatory stimulus, such as the ODA, on the adoption of the open innovation paradigm in the pharmaceutical industry. Results show that the ODA made the adoption of this paradigm by large pharmaceutical companies possible, even if it partially inhibited its implementation. Finally, this study develops a framework characterizing the orphan drug development process in terms of drivers, activities, and actors. Future avenues for research are also suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the propensity for patents by individual inventors to be commercialized. By exploiting a peculiarity of the US patent system, concerning the different patent renewal fees paid in order to obtain small or large entity status, we are able to distinguish patents that become part of a large corporation's patent portfolio. Using an extensive dataset of US patents, for both domestic and foreign individual inventors, we find that patent characteristics, size of research teams, prior patenting experience and past corporate patenting activity are positively associated with an increased likelihood of transferring patent rights to large corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue celebrates the work of Bengt-Åke Lundvall on his 70th birthday. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a key player among a small group of academics in the USA and Europe that developed a new, systemic approach to the study of the interactions between science, innovation, and policy. He contributed to the popularity of the approach in the policy community in several ways, among other things through his period as Deputy Director at the Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry at the OECD between 1992 and 1995, and through his later work for the European Commission, as evidenced among other things by the highly influential booklet, The Globalising Learning Economy: Implications for Innovation Policy. His strong emphasis on learning, a hallmark of Lundvall's approach, is also evident in much of his recent work. This issue has six papers written by some of his collaborators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues in favor of four criteria for assessing the performance of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Office of the US President: trying to killing bad ideas (and sometimes succeeding), mobilizing expertise and confidence to support crisis response, identifying new issues and developing presidential policy initiatives, and catalyzing and coordinating multi-agency science and technology activities, especially in response to presidential goals. These criteria are illustrated with episodes from OSTP’s history. They place OSTP in a variety of roles, ranging from disinterested broker of expertise to policy entrepreneur, but always as an agent of the President. Although a full assessment using these criteria may not be feasible due to data limitations, their identification is nonetheless valuable in order to spark scholarly debate and further research and to support planning by OSTP staff and their interlocutors inside and outside of government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The US National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Division of Policy Research and Analysis (PRA) supported academic research related to, among many other things, measurement of the returns to private and public R&D, during the early 1980s. The findings from this body of research became a foundation for a number of technology and innovation policies promulgated in the aftermath of the US productivity slowdown in the 1970s, and, as we suggest in this paper, a foundation for many contemporary technology and innovation policy initiatives. We argue that there are lessons to be learned from PRA’s successes from its sponsorship of research in this area, and we suggest one possible area of future emphasis for NSF’s ongoing Science of Science and Innovation Policy program. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper compares three internationally representative regulatory frameworks for pesticides. We look first at the USA, which shifted regulatory powers from the US Department of Agriculture to the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s, during a historical transition from a predominantly economic to a predominantly social regulatory model. The second country is Brazil, currently the world’s largest consumer of pesticides, followed by the USA in second place. In the early 1990s, Brazil’s new regulatory model adopted a troika of decision-making ministries (agriculture, health and environment), with the prevalence of economic over social-environmental interests. The third case is the regulatory framework adopted in 2011 by the EU, where shifts in risk-assessment criteria and corporate financial liability reveal a prevalence of concerns involving social-environmental regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following a 2006 revision to the US Magnuson–Stevens Act, the eight Fishery Management Councils that manage the nation’s stocks have been restricted from setting regional catch levels that exceed the recommendations of their primary scientific advisory committees. This paper reviews the impact of that new requirement using principal–agent theory. After demonstrating that the advisory committees are still agents of the Councils, I show that the process of managing federal fisheries stocks now requires a lengthy dialogue between the two groups revolving around issues of risk tolerance, management buffers, and data availability that has resulted in the development of explicit rules for setting biological boundaries on catch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communications from scientists and engineers indicate concern about the potential for public aversion to nanotechnologies. Recommendations that policy dialogues occur early and often as public perceptions emerge have followed, and multiple surveys indicate high benefit ratings. This paper explores instead the mobile and conditional quality of current perceptions of the risks and benefits of nanotechnologies, and of judgments of trust in regulation. Drawing from a nationally representative phone survey of 1,100 US residents, we found that presenting risk information after benefit information had a significant impact on acceptability ratings as compared to the reverse order. Trust judgments were also mobile, and interacted with affective predispositions towards nanotechnologies. Overall, for policy purposes and dialogues, we find high attitudinal uncertainty suggesting considerable openness to context-specific considerations as linked to acceptability of new technologies. We also caution against over promotion of benefits and an avoidance of appropriate risk discussions in the short term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the US National Science Foundation introduced a broader impacts criterion to their merit review process in 1997, policy evaluations remain still scarce. Reactions from different scientific fields varied. This paper aims to quantitatively compare the proposed broader impacts of 360 funded abstracts from biology, engineering, and mathematical/physical sciences. Specifically, it considers whether or not certain fields are more likely to propose certain types of broader impacts activities, whether women principal investigators are more likely to propose broader impacts, and the effect of grant size. This study demonstrates that cultural differences exist between scientific fields and also supports existing policy recommendations that encourage the creation of organizations and partnerships at university level to allow scientists to more easily participate in activities with broader impacts. Emphasizing broader impacts activities may also attract a more diverse scientific workforce, as many individuals do not pursue science because of a perceived lack of impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the USA, stem cell research policy has been addressed at both federal and state levels. This paper focuses on the heterogeneous state policy environment and compares data from surveys of stem cell scientists and other biomedical researchers to evaluate the impact of supportive state policies on stem cell scientists' geographic preferences. At least early in the development of the field, permissive state policies were a strong predictor of scientists' geographic preferences. Combined with an analysis of scientists'policy awareness and explanations of their preferences, these findings suggest that supportive state science policies have influenced scientists' geographic preferences and, at least in the case of stem cell research where federal funding restrictions are prevalent, may help states to successfully recruit scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contributions postdoctoral scholars make to scientific production are well-documented. Increasingly in the USA, serving as a postdoctoral scholar is an expected component of a scientist's career. A notable feature of the job market for postdoctoral scholars is that it is ad hoc. Social network theory and supporting empirical evidence suggest that personal connections in job searches are beneficial for turnover, satisfaction, and productivity outcomes. This is particularly relevant given the large fraction of foreign postdoctoral scholars, who may naturally be more constrained in their search networks than their US-based counterparts. Using the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society's data on postdoctoral scholars in the USA, we explore the relationship between job search methods and these outcomes, focusing on the differences in outcomes between domestic and foreign postdoctoral scholars. We find suggestive evidence of weaker networks for foreign postdoctoral scholars, who more often resort to 'impersonal' searches. The resulting difference in job match quality is related to differences in turnover, satisfaction, and productivity, which suggests that public policies to facilitate the job search of postdoctoral scholars (foreign ones especially) may yield substantial benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two data sets are contrasted: country-level data (R&D performed by business in a particular sector and country (BERD) and company-level data (R&D financed by a particular company regardless where R&D investment is performed). About half of the overall EU vs. US R&D gap is in the information and communications technologies (ICT) sector. In turn, this ICT R&D gap has two faces. Country data suggest that the gap is largely intrinsic: the EU displays lower R&D intensities in several sub-sectors, while ICT sector size and composition are quite similar. On the other hand, company data suggest that the gap is instead structural: the sector size and composition of sub-sectors differ greatly, while R&D intensities are similar. One major explanatory factor lies in international flows of R&D and value added. Companies tend to allocate a larger share of their value added and a smaller share of R&D outside their home markets. In the sub-sectors which include much larger and more numerous US companies, these flows are unbalanced, and (BERD) R&D intensities are thus higher in the US than in Europe, everything else being equal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The patent system has gained political attention in both Europe and the US as the core regulatory regime of an increasingly knowledge-based economy. Both Europe and the US have recently engaged in a series of efforts to reform their patent systems. These efforts reflect a shift from a legal and administrative emphasis on harmonization and globalization toward greater attention to issues of innovation and competition. However, the complexity of the systems, the asymmetric distribution of costs and benefits of change, the diversity of economic and political interests, and the high technical profile of this regulatory field, make reform slow and difficult. Whereas Europe focuses on regional integration, the US focuses on substantive and procedural solutions to perceived failings and abuses. This paper aims to provide an overview of the trajectory of reform in each jurisdiction and to consider whether and how the experiences of each may be of value to the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recently completed National Citizens' Technology Forum (NCTF) was the first nationwide consensus conference in the US. This paper argues that the exercise serves as a proof-of-concept for this mode of public participation in the governance of emerging technologies. The NCTF demonstrated the feasibility of conducting such exercises across three time zones, and illustrated the compatibility of the consensus conference process with American political norms in practice. It provides additional evidence that, given a structured, constructive environment for deliberation, and access to information and expertise, lay citizens can and do produce policy-relevant recommendations in highly technical arenas. Finally, the experience indicates opportunities for future improvements in integrating input from the public, stakeholders, and experts into the policy-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the transition to the entrepreneurial university as part of a broader shift to a knowledge-based economy, arising from a complex interplay between exogenous (top-down) and endogenous factors (bottom-up) of a more or less similar nature, combined in different ways in different countries. Drawing on the experience of four countries (US, Sweden, Japan and Brazil) with different institutional trajectories and degrees of academic entrepreneurial transformation, under varying degrees of state control and levels of university initiative, we argue that a global convergence is currently taking shape toward entrepreneurial universities playing a central role in a knowledge-based economy that moves beyond etatism and pure market relations to an intermediate position within a triple helix regime. The role of public venture capital in financing the transition to the entrepreneurial university and its possible interventions in a counter-cyclical business model, which is also active in periods of economic downturn, are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his now famous speech to the United Nations, laying the groundwork for the US invasion of Iraq. Using specially declassified intelligence information, Powell highlighted, with dramatic visual imagery, Iraq's continued development of biological weapons (BW), emphasizing the purported development of a mobile BW capability. Yet, within a year, all the evidence about the mobile biological labs presented in Powell's UN speech was discredited. In this paper, I will illustrate how US intelligence analysts used particular kinds of anticipatory assumptions and communication techniques to produce classified and unclassified information about the Iraqi mobile labs, which contributed to the flawed assessments and public understanding of the threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portfolio evaluation of R&D programs, that is, assessment of the value or performance across a broad set of projects, programs, or activities, is receiving increasing attention in the federal evaluation community. Now quantitative portfolio evaluation of federal R&D programs is emerging. This paper provides a brief overview of the emerging practice, touching on efforts of the Department of Commerce’s Advanced Technology Program, the Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Department of Energy (DOE). Then the focus shifts to a recent Congressionally driven quantitative portfolio evaluation to inform funding decisions of a large group of applied energy R&D programs of the DOE. These efforts represent the beginnings of systematic quantitative evaluation of entire portfolios of federal R&D projects and programs in place of the prevalent piecemeal approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abuse of human subjects has always been, and continues to be, a problem in the United States. In spite of regulation to protect subjects, the exploitation of disenfranchised groups and the reproduction of social inequalities are entrenched in the American research enterprise. This paper argues that current approaches to protecting subjects are insufficient because they prioritize individualized responses to structural problems. What is not often acknowledged or accounted for is that the worst cases of abuse to subjects occur because of unethical treatment of groups, not individuals. Solutions are proposed to make regulation more responsive to these concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an ongoing trade dispute over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) between the European Union (EU) and the United States and Canada, in recent years there have been some signs that North American regulators are beginning to accept a more precautionary approach to the regulation of GMOs such as that adopted in the EU. One such sign was the Government of Canada's proactive response to a 2001 report written by a Royal Society of Canada (RSC) Expert Panel. This paper examines efforts to enhance Canada's regulatory regime for GMOs based on the RSC Panel's recommendations in order to ascertain whether the regulatory approach has really changed in that country since 2001. The author concludes that, while some efforts have indeed been made, the Government of Canada continues to fall far short of meeting the RSC Panel's expectations in key areas, including food safety, environmental assessment, peer review, transparency, and monitoring and surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public bioethics advisory bodies have been a staple of US public policy for addressing public biotechnology- related controversies, in spite of the limited impact these bodies have had on policy-making. These advisory bodies serve an important tacit function as boundary organizations that stabilize the border between science and politics, preserving the autonomy of science from incursion by other societal stakeholders. In this paper the boundary work of the US National Bioethics Advisory Commission is examined at the border of science and ethics, in its deliberations on embryonic stem cell research. The coupling of scientific and ethical uncertainty, and that of research productivity and integrity assurance in the Commission's deliberations is described. It is argued that the Commission's boundary work reinforced the authority of science and marginalized conflicting civic-sector concerns [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideals of reason and freedom have long occupied central positions in the diplomatic imagination of the United States, leading US foreign policy to emphasize science and democracy as key elements in the fashioning of global order in the 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, the combination of science and democracy seems an increasingly ambivalent source of authority and inspiration. Advances in science and technology threaten to erode the self-determination of democratic societies, while new calls for the democratization of global governance raise difficult questions regarding the power and legitimacy of science and other forms of expertise in international institutions. This paper seeks to open a new dialogue on the conceptual underpinnings of US foreign policy and the potential for fashioning new commitments to reason and freedom that can strengthen both democratic governance and the management of rapid scientific and technological change in contemporary world affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, governments have increasingly employed expert assessments and formal decision-making technologies. While these promise objectivity and transparency, they are just as likely to buffer decisions from public scrutiny. Countries such as Britain and the United States have experienced a sharp decline in electoral participation. Social scientists have responded with participatory techniques to resituate the non-expert citizen at the heart of decision making. This paper explores three specific problems with such methods: evaluation; representation; and agenda setting. It concludes that participatory techniques may have significant potential to inform and supplement representative democracy. However, under current arrangements, it is impossible for them to escape political-cultural constraints that reduce complex moral and aesthetic issues to scientific framings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to alter the range of expertise represented on some US advisory committees have raised questions of accountability in the selection and deployment of expert advice. Governments seem sometimes to adopt the relativist position that all expertise is biased, and that political considerations may therefore determine the official selection of experts; at other times, they endorse the elitist view of expertise as superior knowledge. This paper argues instead that experts exercise a form of delegated authority and should thus be held to norms of transparency and deliberative adequacy that are central to democratic governance. This theoretical perspective should inform the practices of expert deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A model that conceptualizes the development of academic disciplines and related industries as intimately linked is presented. It predicts that the relative strength of a national industry which has a significant input on science or engineering knowledge is causally related to the strength of the nation's relevant science or engineering discipline and vice versa. At national level, the model predicts that, over longer periods a nation cannot remain weak in one domain and strong in the other. It identifies the conditions under which government intervention is likely to be effective. A case study of synthetic dyes in the period 1857–1914 illustrates how these positive feedback processes led Germany and Switzerland to become strong in both organic chemistry and the dye industry, while the UK and France declined in both domains and the USA remained relatively weak in both. A shorter case study of biotechnology supports the predictions made by the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) supports basic and applied biomedical research by funding grants and contracts. To measure the outcomes and impact of their programs, NIH staff conduct program evaluations and undertake targeted investigations of research portfolios. Recently, the NIH launched the electronic scientific portfolio assistant (eSPA), a web-based analytics system based on linked scientific databases that provides quantitative information for program officers and planning and evaluation officials managing research portfolios. This system has improved the ability to create and collaboratively refine research portfolios, has reduced the time needed to collect and link outcomes data such as publications and patents, and is providing information used to support research management decisions. After describing the eSPA system, we provide examples of three eSPA evaluation projects that illustrate the impact of this system on NIH evaluation objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The average firm size of the top R&D investors among US-based companies is smaller than that of the EU-based firms. Does this help to explain why the US has a greater R&D intensity, or is the greater firm size in the EU, just as its lower R&D intensity, determined by the sectors in which the top R&D investors are operating? Using data from the 2006 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, the size differential between EU and US R&D performers is more closely examined. Despite great differences between sectors, the overall distribution of R&D investments by companies in both economies is remarkably similar, as opposed to the distribution of the R&D/sales ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the entrepreneurial university mode that originally appeared in the US possible in China? Thirty-four universities in the '985 Project' were studied in order to address this question. It is hypothesized that the necessary internal factors for a university to be entrepreneurial are: its research, technology transfer and entrepreneurship capabilities. External factors include: government support through policies and funding, venture capital and collaborations with firms. We concluded that it is possible to achieve an entrepreneurial mode in China, though different from that in the US. As a developing country, China starts from a university-run enterprise model, forming firms within the university. These generally operate in nonhigh-tech mode to gain experience and raise capital, as well as develop research capacity, and then upgrade to a high-tech entrepreneurship mode. A few elite universities will become entrepreneurial universities within 10-20 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent trends associated with performance as-sessment and evaluation in US Government R&D agencies are analyzed by, first, giving a contextual overview of three Government-wide performance assessment schemes and, second, illustrating how these and other approaches are employed in four federal R&D funding agencies. While focusing on the rise of bibliometric analysis as an evaluation technique, the broader aim is to help those interested in performance as-sessment, domestically and internationally, to understand the system of R&D evaluation in the USA. Major trends in standardization of performance assessment practices, the utilization of quantitative evaluation methodologies, and the development of new hybrid approaches have emerged over recent years [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The biomedical research workforce plays a crucial role in fostering economic growth and improving public health through discoveries and innovations. This study fills a knowledge gap by providing a comprehensive portrait of this workforce and retention within it. A distinguishing feature is that we use an occupation-based definition which allows us to look 'backward' to field of training and assess the extent to which it has grown more interdisciplinary, and how this differs by gender. The analysis is conducted using restricted-use SESTAT data, the most comprehensive dataset on the scientific workforce in the USA, for the years 1993, 2003, and 2010. Among the findings, we identify differences in interdisciplinarity in training by gender, and these differences have widened. In the retention analysis, which focuses on the 7-year period, 2003–10, we find that retention is negatively and significantly associated with interdisciplinary training for women, but not for men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese scientists constitute the largest group of foreign-born tenure-track faculty in science and engineering (S&E) fields in the USA, and have become a target of recent Chinese government efforts seeking to attract them back to China. This study examines the differences of collaboration networks between Chinese scientists and US-born scientists working in the USA. The findings show significant differences in the size, composition, and role of collaboration networks of Chinese scientists, and how these networks differently impact their productivity. The networks of scientists born in China are smaller, more dispersed, and less communicative. However, despite those networks and less benefit from traditional research resources, Chinese scientists appear to be more productive than their American colleagues are. The study improves understanding of this important group in the USA's research enterprise and also provides insights for science policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process by which universities internationalize their education mission and adopt the 'third mission' of economic development in their local region is widely documented. However, little is known about how transnational educational campuses adopt research and economic development functions. This case study draws on interviews, historical documents, and bibliometric and patent analysis to describe the efforts of one of the longest standing US transnational campuses-Georgia Tech Lorraine-to integrate into the Lorraine region of France by adding research and economic development missions. In describing the campus's evolution, this article highlights key markers indicating the transition to novel competencies. The results indicate that the adoption of new missions is characterized by plans, mixed success, and re-orientation rather than by a directed or designed process. Additionally, the study suggests that efforts to transplant successful programs from the home university to the Lorraine campus were less successful than those involving host region-led partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of labor mobility and geographical proximity in the knowledge diffusion process in the US biopharmaceutical industry. The application of social network analysis to patent authorship reveals that labor mobility and co-inventorship are responsible for a large portion of knowledge flows. This finding provides support for recent studies that called into question the notion that technical and commercially valuable knowledge ubiquitously disseminates in hightechnology industrial agglomerations, indicating instead that such an explanation is only partially true. Results also suggest that high quality inventions draw (proportionally) more from nonlocal knowledge sources and that network connections are more important for the transmission of knowledge for high quality patents than for low quality patents. The substantial concentration of local knowledge flows suggests that industrially targeted public financial support for research and development activities at the regional and state levels can be considered as supportive of firm performance and by extension economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical doctors occasionally discover potentially valuable new off-label uses for drugs during their clinical practice. They apply these to help their own patients, but often have minimal incentives to invest in diffusing them further. Thus, the benefits that other clinicians might obtain are to some extent an externality from the perspective of the discoverer. This represents a form of market failure: effort invested in diffusion could lower adoption costs for many, but few innovators will invest that effort and social welfare will be accordingly reduced. In this study we explore for empirical evidence for the market failure just described, and do find evidence for it. In a sample of US clinicians, diffusion efforts increase the diffusion of generally valuable discoveries, but innovating clinicians typically invest little to support diffusion. We conclude with a discussion of how such a market failure could be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perception of career prospects in their own sector and elsewhere of recent PhD graduates in academia, non-academic research and outside research was studied. Data are from a survey of 1,133 respondents who obtained a PhD from one of five Dutch universities between early 2008 and mid-2012. Career prospects within academia are seen as slimmer than those outside. This is associated with the current sector of employment: outside academia the negative image of academic careers is still stronger than inside. This association remains when other factors, such as the appeal of certain job attributes and several personal characteristics are controlled for. The chance that PhDs seek employment outside academia because of career prospects depends on how they value positive job aspects, such as intellectual challenge. This leads to selection being biased against certain types of PhD graduates in academia, such as those with a taste for societal impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been four major innovation organization policy moments for the US federal government driven by the demands of politics and technology since World War II: first, the immediate post-war period where the Cold War helped drive a basic research model for new and expanded science agencies; second, the Sputnik aftermath with the formation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and scaled up funding for science; third, the competitiveness era ‘valley of death’ programs of the 1980s, and finally, a recent energy technology shift driven by energy and climate demands. Some are advocating a fifth: advanced manufacturing. In that lengthy evolution, what lessons have we learned about the design of federal innovation organizations? What are the institutional elements in the ‘new generation’ innovation policy programs now developing or under consideration? The focus is on the evolving federal agency role: what innovation stages is it organized around within the innovation pipeline and how does it link to other innovation actors?. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study estimates the net social value of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. It focuses specifically on a survey population of 273 applicants for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award since 2006. Using a counterfactual evaluation method, social benefits have been quantified from the responses of 45 Award applicants to a web-based survey. We estimate the ratio of all measured social benefits to costs to be between 351:1 and 820:1. This finding certainly supports the belief that the Baldrige Program creates considerable value for the US economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1990s saw a radical shift in the US investment in large-scale projects along with a shift in the rationale for US support of such projects and the national laboratories which host them. Previously, the largest projects were for the esoteric field of high energy and justifications drew on the Cold War priorities of national security and the cultural benefits of a free society. Starting with Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source, a materials science accelerator, all this changed. From this time forward those promoting large-scale projects instead pointed to more practical considerations in line with the post-Cold-War moral economy valuing entrepreneurship and measurable utility. It might seem that change resulted from a direct competition between high energy physicists and materials scientists that was mediated by high-level policy makers in favor of the latter. This case study reveals a much more telling and nuanced story in which science policy was shaped at every turn by the need of the US national laboratories to adapt to a changing social, political, economic, technological and scientific context amidst the underlying desire for institutional persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]