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The U.S. higher education system stands out in three dimensions. First, it has the highest number of leading research universities. Second, it displays significant differentiation: multiple types of institutions offer services that differ in cost, prestige, etc. Third, it has a laissez‐faire/free‐market orientation: private and public entities are free to open schools and compete; essentially all schools enjoy substantial autonomy. This paper makes the case that these features are systematically related. The development of the American higher education market—which allowed market forces to operate and lacked centralized planning—contributed to the emergence of differentiation and a set of leading research universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper discusses the construction of a new longitudinal database tracking inventors and patent‐owning firms over time. We match granted patents between 2000 and 2011 to administrative databases of firms and workers housed at the U.S. Census Bureau. We use inventor information in addition to the patent assignee firm name to improve on previous efforts linking patents to firms. The triangulated database allows us to maximize match rates and provide validation for a large fraction of matches. In this paper, we describe the construction of the database and explore basic features of the data. We find patenting firms, particularly young patenting firms, disproportionally contribute jobs to the U.S. economy. We find that patenting is a relatively rare event among small firms but that most patenting firms are nevertheless small, and that patenting is not as rare an event for the youngest firms compared to the oldest firms. Although manufacturing firms are more likely to patent than firms in other sectors, we find that most patenting firms are in the services and wholesale sectors. These new data are a product of collaboration within the U.S. Department of Commerce, between the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A highlight of the 2012 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, the pre-conference session on the History of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology Worldwide drew presenters and attendees from around the globe. The day featured papers on four historical themes, starting with the institutional roots of ASIS&T and recognizing decades of research presented in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. The evolution of the field was apparent through a review of information revolutions prompted by the printing press, the post-World War II information crisis and the Internet, as well as through presentations on digital curation,ongoing work on relevance, sense-making theory and developments from Croatia to France.Discussion of the historical contexts of technology innovations and impacts consideredphotographic documentary techniques, binary computing and networking standards. The development of foundational ideas was explored through presentations on pioneering document indexing methods, the semantic challenge of term-oriented retrieval, early European perceptions of classification systems and the French view of communication and information science. Efforts to deepen the historical understanding of information science and technology will continue through oral history interviews, funded research and awards for outstanding papers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, strategy scholars are exploring the relationships between innovation, competition, and the persistence of superior profits. Sustained high profitability may result when a firm repeatedly introduces valuable innovations that service previously unmet consumer demands. While the returns to the firm from each innovation may erode over time, innovation ensures that, overall, the firm maintains a high performance position. At the same time, sustained high profitability may also accrue to firms that innovate less often, but effectively avoid the competition that otherwise erodes high returns. This paper elaborates these relationships before presenting an empirical analysis of the effects of differential innovative propensities and differential rates of competition on pharmaceutical firms' abilities to sustain profit outcomes that are above those earned by competing firms. The analysis, which is situated within the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, finds support for the expected relationship between high innovative propensity and sustained superior profitability, but no support for a link between persistence and the ability to avoid competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the emergence of resources. Our analysis of technological capability acquisition by global U.S.-based chemical firms shows that the emergence of resources is inherently evolutionary We find that path-creating search that generates resource heterogeneity is a response to idiosyncratic situations faced by firms in their local searches. Two such idiosyncratic situations--technology exhaustion and expansion beyond national markets--trigger firms in our sample to create unique innovation search paths. We also find that along a given path firms experiment in order to find the correct investment--in fact, some organizations seem to take a step backward for two steps forward--further demonstrating the evolutionary nature of the resource creation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Court decisions in the 1990s are widely viewed as having opened the door to a flood of business method and financial patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and to have also impacted other patent offices around the world. A number of scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued both the quality of these patents and the decisions themselves. This paper reviews the history of business method and financial patents briefly and then explores what economists know about the relationship between the patent system and innovation, in order to draw some tentative conclusions about their likely impact. It concludes by finding some consensus in the literature about the problems associated with this particular expansion of patentable subject matter, highlighting the remaining areas of disagreement, and reviewing the various policy recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the formative years of biotechnology, ‘star’ bioscientists possessed intellectual capital of extraordinary scientific and pecuniary value. In America and Japan, 35 percent of star bioscientists became involved with firms in commercialising their discoveries (a crucial determinant of success) versus 7 percent in Europe. Did star involvement come at expense of scientific progress? No, the publication rate of these ‘involved stars’ increased very significantly whilst actively involved with firms. Furthermore, citations per article were unchanged or significantly increased; so quality was maintained. Top academic scientists and firms working together led to faster commercial and scientific progress – a truly virtuous circle. Durante los años formativos de la biotecnología, los bioinvestigadores “estrella” acumulaban un capital intelectual de extraordinario valor científico y pecuniario. En América y Japón, el 35 por ciento de bioinvestigadores “estrella” se involucraron con empresas en la comercialización de sus descubrimientos (determinante crucial del éxito) comparado con un 7 por ciento en Europa. ¿Fue este involucramiento a costa del progreso científico? No, la tasa de publicación de estos investigadores estrella aumentó muy significativamente mientras que estaban activamente involucrados con dichas empresas. Es más, el número de citas de sus artículos no cambiaron o aumentaron significativamente, y por tanto la calidad se ha mantenido. Los investigadores más eminentes y las empresas punteras trabajando juntos nos llevan más rápidamente al progreso comercial y científico – un círculo virtuoso verdadero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation can occur at the national level under a wide range of settings. However, the leading innovative countries internationally have several common traits, including economic, financial and political stability, which are reflected in various measures of country risk. The purpose of the paper is to examine, for the first time, the relationship between the economic, financial and political country risk ratings, on the one hand, and innovation, as measured by a country's registered patents, on the other. The relationships between various monthly country risk ratings and registered patents are analyzed for the leading 12 foreign patenting countries in the USA from 1975 to 1997. The empirical results show that economic, financial and political risk ratings have a considerable impact on the innovative activities of the 12 countries. Total US patent applications are also influential in inducing innovation in the 12 countries. Such issues have not previously been addressed in the literature on country risk and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the agency view of corporate governance, we propose that technology-intensive firms use both outcome and behavior-based performance criteria for rewarding CEOs. Using a sample of 206 firms from 12 U.S. manufacturing industries, we find that as technological intensity increases CEO bonuses are more closely linked to financial results and that total CEO incentives are associated with two indicators of desirable innovation behaviors: invention resonance and science harvesting. Invention resonance refers to the impact a firm's inventions have on other firms' inventions, while science harvesting reflects a firm's commitment to scientific research. As technological intensity increases, aligning bonus with financial results, total incentives with invention resonance, and total incentives with science harvesting predict firm market performance. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a study that combined two theoretical perspectives--top manager and network/institutional--to examine the factors influencing organizations to adopt innovative management practices. The study setting was a system of public hospitals and the innovation was Total Quality Management (TQM). Study results indicate that both top manager and network/institutional factors are important determinants of whether and when organizations adopt innovations. However, as predicted, the relative importance of these two sets of factors appears to change as an innovation becomes more widely diffused. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have advanced various theories to explain the common failure of market leaders in the face of revolutionary technological change. The history of NCR Corporation provides an instructive exception to that general pattern. This paper examines how NCR addressed the introduction of electronics to the field of business equipment and the advent of digital computers to widespread use. It describes NCR `s entry into the computer industry in the 1950s and its commitment to evolutionary adaptation of its core products. It shows how persistence in old modes of practice led eventually to a crisis, which was resolved favorably when new management and fundamental organizational transformations reversed adverse trends and restored robust profitability. While established academic theories can help to explain aspects of the story, no single theoretical perspective is sufficient to explain the path of NCR's behavior. NCR survived, we conclude, because new leadership provided the impetus to actualize latent dynamic capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both theoretical and conceptual understanding of innovation has developed significantly since the early 1980s. More noticeable, however, are the major changes that have been experienced in empirically-oriented innovation research as a result of the introduction of firm level innovation surveys. Collecting innovation related data via firm based surveys has now become a common practice for many countries for example, Canada, United States, Malaysia, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand as well as almost all EU countries. These survey-lead approaches have transformed our understanding of the nature and determinants of innovation and also increased our understanding of the role played by innovation in growth. At the same time, the surveys themselves have also been adapted as our conceptual understanding of innovation has increased. As such, the balance of innovation-related research has shifted from a theoretical to a primarily empiricist-lead agenda, and increasingly combined both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The objective of this paper is examine how our understanding of innovation has evolved over the last few decades, to identify the major theoretical and empirical influences on our understanding, and to assess the role which innovation surveys have played in this evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many US firms are improving their individual competitiveness by offshoring manufacturing operations, services and, increasingly, knowledge work. Although research to date has maintained that these practices are beneficial to the offshoring firm and national economies, by reducing costs and expanding markets, little is known about the longer term effect of offshoring on the rate of innovation of home economies. This paper suggests that offshoring practices have adverse effects on innovation at the national home base. The analysis uses patents in the rare-earth element industry, a high-tech area which is among those that have evolved the furthest towards outsourcing and relocation away from the US and to developing countries. Looking at the rare-earth industry can provide insights in identifying potential long term impacts of offshoring on innovation because many other US industries are likely to adopt similar offshoring strategies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We use innovation premium (IP), proposed by Forbes, as a proxy for firm innovation to present evidence that firm value is positively associated with IP. The positive impact of the IP on firm value is amplified by overconfident CEOs, particularly in the high‐tech and biotech industries with a high proportion of intellectual capital and intangible assets. In a series of tests, we confirm that the results hold after controlling for endogeneity. our findings are consistent with the notion that the beneficial effect of corporate innovations generated by overconfident CEOs exists primarily in industries where innovations are in critical demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to study inequality in innovation? Often, the focus has been gender gaps in patenting. Yet much is missing from our understanding of gendered inequality in innovation with this focus. This review discusses how gender and innovation are intertwined in durable academic inequalities and have implications for who is served by innovation. It summarizes research on gender and race gaps in academic entrepreneurship (including patenting), reasons for those longstanding inequities, and concludes with discussing why innovation gaps matter, including the need to think critically about academic commercialization. And while literature exists on gender gaps in academic entrepreneurship and race gaps in patenting, intersectional analyses of innovation are missing. Black feminist theorists have taught us that gender and race are overlapping and inseparable systems of oppression. We cannot accurately understand inequality in innovation without intersectionality, so this is a serious gap in current research. Intersectional research on gender and innovation is needed across epistemic approaches and methods. From understanding discrimination in academic entrepreneurship to bringing together critical analyses of racial capitalism and academic capitalism, there is much work to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional model of closed innovation has been challenged, and firms in biomedical sciences are teaming up with universities to advance scientific discoveries and publish their research results in scholarly journals. This study examines the contingent nature of the relationship between university‐industry alliances and a firm's follow‐on contribution to open science in the context of therapeutic biotechnology. It integrates insights from organizational learning theory and sociology of science to explore boundary conditions of the efficacy of the organizational learning mechanism across the realms of business and academic science. Specifically, our contention is that, under certain circumstances, for‐profit firms are likely to learn from their university alliance partners how to harness the dynamics of the open system of scientific knowledge exchange and embrace open science. Our contingency model elucidates the moderating role of a firm's R&D pipeline of drug candidates in clinical development and a firm's R&D expertise diversity across therapeutic categories. The empirics are based on a longitudinal analysis of a sample of therapeutic biotechnology firms in the United States over the period 2003–2010. We estimate negative binomial models to test our predictions. In support of our hypotheses, our findings indicate that reaching out to university alliances is positively related to firms' publishing with academic co‐authors when firms develop stronger R&D pipeline and more diverse R&D expertise across therapeutic categories. The results of our study point to complementarities between collaborations with universities and a firm's investments in strengthening and diversifying its drug development pipeline in the process of public knowledge creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we develop a vintage model to gain a better understanding of the semiconductor industry and its role in recent U.S. productivity gains. Unlike previous work, in our model the observed price declines of individual chips are driven by the introduction of better vintages rather than by learning economies. Dominated chips, nonetheless, continue to be produced, for a time, due to sunk investments in chip-specific production equipment. The model lends partial support to Jorgenson's hypothesis that an exogenous increase in Moore's Law could have generated the more rapid price declines, and faster productivity growth, seen after 1995. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate four contributors to crisis readiness: market turbulence, innovative capacity, perceived likelihood of a crisis (PLC) and firm size. Results from a PLS‐SEM assessment of 284 managers in the United States suggest that market turbulence is not only a precursor to crisis readiness but also affects PLC and innovative capacity in firms. We conclude that managers in SMEs were more likely to expect a crisis but less prepared to address one when it strikes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author argues that the current funding mechanisms in the U.S. limits innovative research ideas. According to the author, both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation fail to fund innovative ideas. He explains why experts or established researchers are resistant to new ideas. He points out that grant agencies allow cronyism to affect the impartial review of innovative research strategies and ideas.

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Organizational sponsors of guest workers to the United States claim foreign‐born workers enhance productivity and innovation. Drawing upon a unique dataset of all organizational sponsors of guest workers in the United States from 1993 to 2008, we find a 10% increase in guest worker sponsorship is associated with a 2.2–3.1% increase in patenting within firms. Furthermore, we examine how organizational industry and country of origin are associated with the effects of guest worker sponsorship on organization‐level measures of innovation and productivity. Despite an overall within‐firm positive association between sponsorship and patenting, higher percentages of a firm's workers on visas are associated with lower patenting, but higher labor productivity. Firm‐level industry and country of origin heterogeneity is significantly related to the relationship between guest work sponsorship and both patent‐related and nonpatent investment in innovation such as research and development (R&D) expenditures. Semiconductor firms and universities spend more on R&D in conjunction with guest worker sponsorship, while semiconductor companies and hardware companies patent less. We discuss theoretical and human resource implications, and offer suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Transaction records involving U.S. patent documents have been maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for over 40 years, but have not been extensively used by scholars. One explanation is that these data have not been in a form amenable for research. To help remedy this deficiency and to foster scholarship, the USPTO Office of Chief Economist is curating internal agency records to release a series of datasets in research‐ready formats. This article describes the USPTO Patent Assignment Dataset (UPAD), a relational database of roughly 6 million assignments, licenses, securitizations, and other conveyances involving about 10 million U.S. patents and patent applications, recorded 1970–2014. To promote research uses, this article provides a comprehensive data description and presents stylized facts derived from the records. Although this article discusses several limitations inherent in using these data, the release of the UPAD creates opportunities to conduct original research, particularly relating to intellectual property collateralization and the markets for technology and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dental graduates of 2040 will face new and complex challenges. If they are to meet these challenges, dental schools must develop a research and discovery mission that will equip graduates with the new knowledge required to function in a modern health care environment. The dental practitioner of 2040 will place greater emphasis on risk assessment, disease prevention, and health maintenance; and the emerging discipline of precision medicine and systems biology will revolutionize disease diagnosis and reveal new targeted therapies. The dental graduate of 2040 will be expected to function effectively in a collaborative, learning health care system and to understand the impact of health care policy on local, national, and global communities. Emerging scientific fields such as big data analytics, stem cell biology, tissue engineering, and advanced biomimetics will impact dental practice. Despite all the warning signs indicating how the changing scientific and heath care landscape will dramatically alter dental education and dental practice, dental schools have yet to reconsider their research and educational priorities and clinical practice objectives. Until dental schools and the practicing community come to grips with these challenges, this persistent attitude of complacency will likely be at the dental profession's peril. This article was written as part of the project "Advancing Dental Education in the 21st Century." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT We find cross-sectional evidence that a financially constrained firm with patentable innovation opportunities can use discretionary accruals to reveal information about the firm's prospects and facilitate its financing activities. Specifically, using firms with patents in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) patent database, we find that among financially constrained firms, higher discretionary accruals are associated with more capital being raised, greater research and development (R&D) expenditures, more patents, more patent citations, and better operating performance in the future. These positive relationships are driven by firms that raise equity capital, especially those that raise equity capital from employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American states are engaged in a variety of policy efforts to mitigate climate change and alter energy usage. While a number of studies have considered the reasons for adoption of renewable energy and climate change policies, they typically consider only one policy in isolation. This study examines policy adoption of 14 energy and climate change programs in a pooled event history analysis. Our primary research questions consider average effects of horizontal policy diffusion, while also identifying factors that vary across policy type. We offer a method of testing whether predictors vary across policies and use this test to incorporate interactions by policy in the statistical analysis. Our results indicate that many of the primary drivers of adoption are political in nature, including state ideology, environmental interest group membership, and diffusion via ideologically similar neighbors. In addition, we find that given policy heterogeneity, a number of determinants vary by policy type, though differences are in magnitude rather than direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy entrepreneurship is often used to explain agenda setting through reference to the behavior of individual 'change agents.' But there are still gaps in our understanding of what motivates entrepreneurs. Rational choice theory emphasizes the importance of material and nonmaterial incentives; however, it remains unclear what role institutions play. This article aims to empirically examine the relationship between incentives and institutional encouragement of innovation. Using a case study of the federal government of Canada, I find evidence that incentives matter. Government agencies with many incentives are more likely to encourage innovation than agencies with few incentives. These results underscore the importance of institutions in determining the motivations of policy entrepreneurs, and suggest future research should focus on the interplay among individual, political, and institutional factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestically funded (and performed) research and development (R&D) has historically been a major source of productivity gains in U.S. agriculture, and a principal source of R&D spillovers to the rest of the world. In the waning decades of the 20th century, U.S. policymakers opted to ratchet down the rate of growth in public support for food and agricultural R&D. As the 21st century unfolds, slowing growth has given way to real cutbacks, reversing the accumulation of U.S.-sourced public R&D capital over most of the previous century and more. The 2014 Farm Bill did little to reverse these long-run research funding trajectories-politicians failed to heed the economic evidence about the still substantial social payoffs of that research and the consequent slowdown in U.S. agricultural productivity growth associated with the spending slowdown. Meanwhile, R&D spending by other countries has been moving in different directions. We present new evidence that today's middle-income countries-notably China, Brazil, and India- are not only growing in relative importance as producers of agricultural innovations through investments in public R&D, they are also gaining considerable ground in terms of their share of privately performed research of relevance for agriculture. The already substantive changes in global public and private R&D investment trajectories are accelerating. If history is any guide to the future, these changing R&D trajectories could have profound consequences for the competitiveness of U.S. agriculture in the decades ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context In recent decades, practitioners and policymakers have turned to value-based payment initiatives to help contain spending on health care and to improve the quality of care. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded 7 grantees across the country to design and implement value-based, multistakeholder payment reform projects in 6 states and 3 regions of the United States. Methods As the external evaluator of these projects, we reviewed documents, conducted Internet searches, interviewed key stakeholders, cross-validated factual and narrative interpretation, and performed qualitative analyses to derive cross-site themes and implications for policy and practice. Findings The nature of payment reform and its momentum closely reflects the environmental context of each project. Federal legislation such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and federal and state support for the development of the patient-centered medical home and accountable care organizations encourage value-based payment innovation, as do local market conditions for payers and providers that combine a history of collaboration with independent innovation and experimentation by individual organizations. Multistakeholder coalitions offer a useful facilitating structure for galvanizing payment reform. But to achieve the objectives of reduced cost and improved quality, multistakeholder payment innovation must overcome such barriers as incompatible information systems, the technical difficulties and transaction costs of altering existing billing and payment systems, competing stakeholder priorities, insufficient scale to bear population health risk, providers' limited experience with risk-bearing payment models, and the failure to align care delivery models with the form of payment. Conclusions From the evidence adduced in this article, multistakeholder, value-based payment reform requires a trusted, widely respected 'honest broker' that can convene and maintain the ongoing commitment of health plans, providers, and purchasers. Change management is complex and challenging, and coalition governance requires flexibility and stable leadership, as market conditions and stakeholder engagement and priorities shift over time. Another significant facilitator of value-based payment reform is outside investment that enables increased investment in human resources, information infrastructure, and care management by provider organizations and their collaborators. Supportive community and social service networks that enhance population health management also are important enablers of value-based payment reform. External pressure from public and private payers is fueling a 'burning bridge' between the past of fee-for-service payment models and the future of payments based on value. Robust competition in local health plan and provider markets, coupled with an appropriate mix of multistakeholder governance, pressure from organized purchasers, and regulatory oversight, has the potential to spur value-based payment innovation that combines elements of 'reformed' fee-for-service with bundled payments and global payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of emerging knowledge is crucial for innovation by firms competing in science and technology-intensive industries. However, relatively little is known about how and where firms search externally for emerging knowledge. This study investigates collaborative and geographic proximate search patterns and the use of emergent knowledge in innovation activities. The examination of patent references in the US biotechnology industry reveals significant differences among knowledge-search patterns. Collaborative search relates to emerging knowledge, but the age of the knowledge increases with geographic distance because knowledge sourced internationally tends to be older than national or local knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In an era of congressional gridlock, innovation and pathways for the future of environmental policymaking are needed. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has long been an innovator in environmental decisionmaking, reconciling stakeholder differences. Yet, with the decline of negotiated rulemaking ('reg neg'), the purpose of our examination is to offer insights into how a contemporary US EPA creates rules. This exploratory study examines original interview data from actors involved during the creation of EPA rules to suggest that a present-day EPA uses a new approach, shuttle diplomacy, to develop rules. The findings from our research suggest that this new rule development method can help agencies that might operate in an adversarial environment to reconcile stakeholder differences while writing the language of a proposed rule before publishing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. We argue that this new rule development model is important for understanding the next generation of environmental rulemaking, not only in the US, but internationally as well. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Objective This article examines the relationship between drug price and drug quality and how it varies across two of the most common regulatory regimes in the pharmaceutical market: minimum efficacy standards ( MES) and a mix of MES and price control mechanisms ( MES + PC). Data Sources Our primary data source is the Tufts-New England Medical Center-Cost Effectiveness Analysis Registry which have been merged with price data taken from MEPS (for the United States) and AIFA (for Italy). Study Design Through a simple model of adverse selection we model the interaction between firms, heterogeneous buyers, and the regulator. Principal Findings The theoretical analysis provides two results. First, an MES regime provides greater incentives to produce high-quality drugs. Second, an MES + PC mix reduces the difference in price between the highest and lowest quality drugs on the market. Conclusion The empirical analysis based on United States and Italian data corroborates these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: With the development of transformative drugs at a low point, numerous commentators have recommended new legislation that uses supplementary market exclusivity as an incentive to promote innovation in the pharmaceutical market. Methods: This report provides an historical perspective on proposals for encouraging drug research. Four legislative programs have been primarily designed to offer market exclusivity to promote public health goals in the pharmaceutical or biomedical sciences: the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, the Orphan Drug Act of 1983, the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984, and the pediatric exclusivity provisions of the FDA Modernization Act of 1997. I reviewed quantitative and qualitative studies that reported on the outcomes from these programs and evaluated the quality of evidence generated. Findings: All four legislative programs generally have been regarded as successful, although such conclusions are largely based on straightforward descriptive reports rather than on more rigorous comparative data or analyses that sufficiently account for confounding. Overall, solid data demonstrate that market exclusivity incentives can attract interest from parties involved in drug development. However, using market exclusivity to promote innovation in the pharmaceutical market can be prone to misuse, leading to improper gains. In addition, important collateral effects have emerged with substantial negative public health implications. Conclusions: Using market exclusivity to promote pharmaceutical innovation can lead to positive outcomes, but the practice is also characterized by waste and collateral effects. Certain practices, such as mechanisms for reevaluation and closer ties of incentives programs to public health outcomes, can help address these problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation underpins the industrial way of life. It is assumed implicitly both that it will continue to do so, and that it will produce solutions to the problems we face involving climate and resources. These assumptions underlie the thinking of many economists and the political leaders whom they influence. Such a view assumes that innovation in the future will be as productive as it has been in the recent past. To test whether this is likely to be so, we investigate the productivity of innovation in the United States using data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The results suggest that the conventional optimistic view may be unwarranted. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technology (IT) innovation research examines the organizational and technological factors that determine IT adoption and diffusion, including firm size and scope, technological competency and expected benefits. We extend the literature by focusing on information requirements as a driver of IT innovation adoption and diffusion. Our framework of IT innovation diffusion incorporates three industry-level sources of information requirements: process complexity, clock speed and supply chain complexity. We apply the framework to US manufacturing industries using aggregate data of internet-based innovations and qualitative analysis of two industries: wood products and beverage manufacturing. Results show systematic patterns supporting the basic thesis of the information processing paradigm: higher IT innovation diffusion in industries with higher information processing requirements; the salience of downstream industry structure in the adoption of interorganizational systems; and the role of the location of information intensity in the supply chain in determining IT adoption and diffusion. Our study provides a new explanation for why certain industries were early and deep adopters of internet-based innovations while others were not: variation in information processing requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President Bush and his Council of Economic Advisors have claimed that the US shouldn't adopt a national health program because doing so would slow innovation in health care. Some have attacked this argument by challenging its moral claim that innovativeness is a good ground for choosing between health care systems. This reply is misguided. If we want to refute the argument from innovation, we have to undercut the premise that seems least controversial – the premise that our current system produces more innovation than a national health program would. I argue that this premise is false. The argument requires clarifying the concept ‘national health program’ and examining various theories of human well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]