Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 66.
(refine search)
Conference Paper
From ideas to innovations: moving technology toward the marketplace through universities and national labs
Our nation?s leadership, and perhaps even our economic viability, depends on the willingness and ability of businesses, industries, research institutions, and colleges and universities to work together. Collaborative excellence at the intersections of science, technology, and the marketplace holds the key to our future.
Report
Knowledge diffusion through employee mobility
In high-tech industries, one important method of diffusion is through employee mobility: many of the entering firms are started by employees from incumbent firms using some of their former employers? technological know-how. This paper explores the effect of incorporating this mechanism in a general industry framework by allowing employees to imitate their employers? know-how. The equilibrium is Pareto optimal since the employees ?pay? for the possibility of learning their employers? know-how. The model?s implications are consistent with data from the rigid disk drive industry. These ...
Working Paper
On the timing of innovation in stochastic Schumpeterian growth models
Recent work has revived the Schumpeterian hypothesis that recessions facilitate innovation and growth. But a major source of productivity growth, research and development, is actually procyclical. This paper argues that while it is optimal to concentrate growth enhancing activities in downturns, dynamic spillovers inherent to the R&D process lead private agents to concentrate too much of their R&D activity in booms, precisely when its social cost is highest. Thus, while previous literature has argued recessions promote growth and intertemporal substitution is a desirable consequence of ...
Working Paper
The agglomeration of R&D labs
This paper has been superseded by WP 15-03. The authors study the location and productivity of more than 1,000 research and development (R&D) labs located in the Northeast corridor of the U.S. Using a variety of spatial econometric techniques, they find that these labs are substantially more concentrated in space than the underlying distribution of manufacturing activity. Ripley's K-function tests over a variety of spatial scales reveal that the strongest evidence of concentration occurs at two discrete distances: one at about one-quarter of a mile and another at about 40 miles. These ...
Journal Article
The University of Minnesota as a public good
Journal Article
Clusters of knowledge: R&D proximity and the spillover effect
> T he United States is home to some of the most innovative companies in the world, such as Apple, Facebook, and Google, to name a few. Inventive activity depends on research and development, and R&D depends on, among other things, the exchange of ideas among individuals. People?s physical proximity is a key ingredient in the innovation process. Steve Jobs understood this when he helped to design the layout of Pixar Animation Studios. The original plan called for three buildings, with separate offices for animators, scientists, and executives. Jobs instead opted for a single building with a ...
Working Paper
Nonobviousness and the incentive to innovate: an economic analysis of intellectual property reform
U.S. patent law protects only inventions that are nontrivial advances of the prior art. The legal requirement is called nonobviousness. During the 1980s, the courts relaxed the nonobviousness requirement for all inventions, and a new form of intellectual property, with a weaker nonobviousness requirement, was created for semiconductor designs. Supporters of these changes argue that a less stringent nonobviousness requirement encourages private research and development (R&D) by increasing the probability that the resulting discoveries will be protected from imitation. This paper demonstrates ...
Journal Article
Intangibles: what put the new in the new economy?
Generating new products requires corporations to spend very large sums of money. These expenditures often lead to the development of intangible assets, such as patents and copyrights, that can add considerably to a company's coffers and stock market value. However, in general, our accounting conventions do not recognize these expenditures as investments--a holdover from the days when these types of investments were a negligible portion of total investment. Leonard Nakamura argues that these conventions cause profits and savings to be understated and that correcting them makes U.S. economic ...
Conference Paper
The role of universities and technology commercialization in economic development
Tech generates new wealth in its region and universities are more important than ever in their role fostering regional growth.