The importance of manufacturing extension—A state perspective

The importance of manufacturing extension programs to the states, who are both sponsors and customers of these programs, centers around the economic impact that states expect will be derived for client manufacturing firms and their local economies. States are driven by the need to preserve and enhance their manufacturing base as a vital, wealth-creating sector of their economies. They recognize that the cycle of rapid and constant change in both the use of technology and business systems which is being generated by the global economy impacts their small and medium-sized companies disproportionately. So they look to manufacturing extension programs to assist these companies through the transition, thus enabling them to survive and thrive in global competition.     

Performance of knowledge interactions between public research centres and industrial firms in Spain: a project-level analysis

This paper examines cooperation between public research centres (PRCs) and industrial firms. We analyse two types of impact—scientific and techno economic—using objective and subjective measures, and explore the determinants of these impacts by investigating the pre-project context, and the way that relationships are implemented and managed. The main novelty of this paper is that the empirical analysis focuses on project level relationships, based on an original database for the Spanish case; it is the characteristics of these relationships that are the core of our analysis. The results show that the impacts identified are contingent on different characteristics in the relationships between PRCs and industrial firms, and that the influence of these characteristics varies depending on the type of impact considered.     

Measuring the Economic Returns from Successful NASA Life Sciences Technology Transfers

Since 1958 NASA has invested approximately $3.7 billion in life sciences R&D in the support of the successful human space flight program. There are numerous studies documenting the spin-off technologies that can be traced to NASA research and development activities. Most of these studies describe the technologies and their uses; however only a few measure the economic impact of the spin-offs and most of these are benefit/cost studies that tend to overstate benefits or underestimate costs. This study takes a different approach, measuring only economic impacts to the companies that developed successful spin-off products from NASA life sciences investments. A personal interview was conducted with each company and the benefits are conservatively estimated as the value-added by the NASA technology to the company's output and the amount of additional private R&D stimulated by the NASA R&D.This pilot study of fifteen companies, using a very conservative measurement technique, found a large return to companies that have successfully commercialized NASA life sciences spin-off products. Value-added benefits totaled over $3.7 billion in life sciences R&D in the support of the successful human space flight program. There are numerous studies documenting the spin-off technologies that can be traced to NASA research and development activities. Most of these studies describe the technologies and their uses; however only a few measure the economic impact of the spin-offs and most of these are benefit/cost studies that tend to overstate benefits or underestimate costs. This study takes a different approach, measuring only economic impacts to the companies that developed successful spin-off products from NASA life sciences investments. A personal interview was conducted with each company and the benefits are conservatively estimated as the value-added by the NASA technology to the company's output and the amount of additional private R&D stimulated by the NASA R&D.This pilot study of fifteen companies, using a very conservative measurement technique, found a large return to companies that have successfully commercialized NASA life sciences spin-off products. Value-added benefits totaled over 1.5 billion and a NASA R&D total investment in these 15 technologies of 64 million was found to stimulate an additional64 million was found to stimulate an additional 200 million in private R&D.     

A new lexicon and framework for analyzing the internal structures of the U.S. Advanced Technology Program and its analogues around the world

Analogues of the U.S.’s Advanced Technology Program can be found in many countries around the world. These government programs provide financial assistance to firms and other entities to develop innovative technologies in the conviction that these developments will contribute to future economic strength. For political and economic reasons, these programs tend to be complex and intricate in their design. No informed evaluation and comparison of such programs can take place without a clear understanding of their internal structures. This paper analyzes the anatomy of such programs and constructs a vocabulary for understanding program design choices. It identifies and discusses a representative sample of important program design features—eligibility requirements, the nature of the research, technical scope, the selection process, and public-private financial arrangements—and provides examples of national programs embodying alternative design choices. This paper should interest policymakers, program administrators, program evaluators, and others involved in program design, management and evaluation. This paper is drawn from a draft reprot, “A Multi-Country, Binational Comparison of the ATP and its Analogues,” by the author, prepared for the National Institue of Standards and Technology. The draft reprot covers additional program features of a number of programs in different countries.     

Determinant factors of university spin-off: the case of Korea

Increasingly more research has examined the creation of university spin-off firms as are seen as an important source of regional and national economic growth. However little is known about the factors influencing the formation of university spin-off in Asian countries, especially in Korea. This paper contributes to the literature on academic entrepreneurship by deepening our understanding on determinant factors of university spin-off in the case of Korea. We investigate organizational and institutional factors highlighted in the literature as influencing the creation of university spin-off companies. The Korean government has implemented the INNOPOLIS Research Institute Spin-off (IRIS) program to enable universities to create new firms within special research and development (R&D) zones to commercialize public R&D output. The capability of universities to establish new firms through the program varies; consequently, this study utilized 122 universities from 2013 to 2015 to analyze determinant factors that affect university spin-offs. Panel logit and negative binomial analysis results indicate that university location has the highest positive influence on IRIS. Government-sponsored funding has a negative impact; however, the likelihood that universities create spin-offs and the number of IRIS firms are positively and significantly affected by publications, patents, research funding, and number of university spin-offs.     

Relationship Between Two Types of Help Seeking Behavior in Domestic Violence Victims

A coordinated community response system to the help-seeking behaviors of domestic violence victims is critical to minimize the impact of violent events and to educate the public, so that safe and effective conflict management skills may replace violent responses. The focus for the present study is to identify and analyze victims’ choices of law enforcement assistance in stopping the violence and/or aid through the services of the regional family violence center. Some victims select legal channels of support; others rely exclusively on social service support, and others seek assistance from both sources. Characteristics of victims whose cases followed two types of help-seeking behavior patterns—legal support or social support–were determined through archived data from both the records of a regional family violence center (FVC) (n=258) and domestic violence incident reports of a police department serving a city of approximately 200,000 citizens (n=127). Findings indicate that African American victims more frequently sought protection through law enforcement sources than they did through family violence center services, and the reverse was true for Euro-Americans.     

A framework for the analysis of corruption

The article sets out a framework within which the problem of corruption may be analysed in any specific country. It does not seek to establish the importance of such activity in a general sense, or seek to propose particular economic policy or institutional programmes that should be pursued in order to reduce the impact on the development process. Rather, the objective is to provide a structure for two distinct areas of analysis. Firstly, it considers the investigation of the determinants of corruption, emphasising the environment in which corruption evolves — whether shaped by international, national or specific institutional factors — and the manner in which the different parties to corruption interact and organise themselves in conducting these activities. Secondly, the article focusses on the importance of corruption for economic development by considering the different forms of corruption and the characteristics of these forms that are most critical for economic activity. Here, the distortions that are introduced into on-going economic activity are identified, together with the manner in which these distortions redirect activity in sub-optimal directions. In addition, the nature of the uncertainty attaching to these differing forms of corruption is considered, and especially the degree to which a form may be considered anarchic or structured in character: the former reflecting a system of intense uncertainty, and the latter one of less uncertainty — perhaps, only minimal uncertainty — as a predictable and stable set of relationships between parties is established. Finally, the article reviews the empirical work that has been undertaken in this field. This article, therefore, seeks to identify how detailed case study analysis, focussed on individual countries — and, indeed, on specific institutions or sectors within those countries — could valuably complement these existing studies, and provide a framework for those seeking to design policy that is appropriate to any individual circumstance. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Superfilling technology: transferring knowledge to industry from the National Institute of Standards and Technology

In the mid-1990s, the semiconductor industry manufactured devices with critical circuit dimensions of between 0.35 and 0.25 μ, and it used aluminum or an aluminum copper alloy to interconnect device components. However, the critical dimension needed to be reduced so that devices could become faster and more efficient. At circuits dimensions of 0.18 μ or less, aluminum no longer conducts electricity well enough to maintain the circuit’s efficiency; thus, the industry determined that copper—a superior conducting material—would be needed to help the industry produce smaller and faster semiconductor devices. Still, technical barriers existed, preventing a seamless transition from aluminum to copper. Thus, in the 1990s, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began focused research on superfilling aimed at assisting the semiconductor industry during this period. In this paper, we document the net economic benefits (private and social) accruing from NIST’s core research investments in superfilling during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Using traditional evaluation methodology and metrics, we calculated economic impact estimates, and the results suggest that NIST’s public resources were, from a social perspective, used efficiently.     

Return on Investment in Innovation: Implications for Institutions and National Agencies*

Commercial success in universities in the USA and Canada has resulted in many other countries taking steps to emulate this performance and major technology transfer and commercialisation support programmes have been launched in UK, Europe, Australia, Japan and many other countries—including South Africa. Unrealistic expectations have, however, been generated by the spectacular successes of a relatively few institutions and it is not always realised that the success from commercialisation is proportional to the magnitude of the investment in research. Without a well funded, high quality research system, it is not possible for technology transfer to make any significant contribution to economic development. The possible economic returns to higher education institutions from commercialisation of research can be estimated using international benchmarks. This forecast uses a combination of an institutional return on investment model and a simple economic projection. The model is generic and can be adapted for use in any institution. As more data becomes available from local (and international) sources, the model will be refined to give better estimates. The model is dynamic and shows, quantitatively, why it can take up to 10 years for an institution, and 20 years nationally, to attain a positive rate of return from an investment in research and technology transfer. The model enables the long-term impact of policy decisions, in an institution and nationally, to be examined and alternative scenarios explored. The performance of individual institutions is, however, highly variable and unpredictable. This is even for those institutions that are comparable in size and maturity. A large portfolio of patents and licences is required to give a reasonable probability of positive returns. This may be possible at a national level, but is problematic in smaller institutions—and smaller countries. Because the benefits of the innovation system are captured largely at national level, with institutions having a high uncertainty, public sector support to reduce the institutional risk is necessary to assist institutions to make the necessary investments. Technology transfer is of course only one element of the overall research and innovation value chain. All elements must be functioning effectively to derive the economic and social benefits from research. In addition to a strong research system, adequate incentives must exist to encourage academics to participate, particularly with regard to the crucial initial step of invention disclosure. After disclosure, sufficient institutional capacity must be in place to take an idea, evaluate it, protect the intellectual property appropriately and then seek a path to commercialisation through either licensing or start-up company formation. *Based on the paper “Return on Investment in Innovation: Implications for Institutions and National Agencies” presented at The First Globelics Conference on Innovation Systems and Development Strategies for the Third Millennium, Rio de Janeiro, November 2003.     

Workers’ mobility and patterns of knowledge diffusion: evidence from Italian data

The channels through which firms access and acquire new and relevant knowledge for their innovative activities is a critical issue to the geography and the management of innovation. In this regard, recent studies have suggested that the mobility of workers across firms is a primary source of new knowledge for the hiring firm and, more in general, of knowledge diffusion across firms. However, little evidence has been presented and discussed about the role and the impact of workers’ mobility on the processes of knowledge transfer across firms. The present paper, thus, aims precisely at contributing to this stream of research by making use of unique data on Italian inventors’ curriculum vitae. The results of the empirical analysis indicate that the mobility of inventors is a mechanism that spurs processes of cumulative knowledge and innovation building from the departure firm to the destination one and significantly impacts on knowledge diffusion across firms.     

The impact of research and technology organizations on firm competitiveness. Measurement and determinants

The objective of this work is to evaluate the impact of research and technology organizations (RTO) on firm competitiveness. To this end, we develop a framework that includes strategies to deal with the methodological problems highlighted in the literature. The main features of this framework are the definition and classification of different types of impacts, the estimation of (rough) quantitative measures of them and the development of a multivariate model to explain the different impacts including the traditional indicators of firm characteristics and their relationships. The empirical work is based on a database constructed from information from the responses to a questionnaire designed specifically to estimate the impact of RTOs on Spanish firms, and information from the Spanish Innovation Survey. Our findings show that firms are able to recognize the influence of these relationships on different technical, economic, investment and intangible impacts and to roughly estimate their economic impact, and that several characteristics of these relationships affect the impact of RTOs.     

Contextualising Regional Innovation Systems in a Globalising Learning Economy: On Knowledge Bases and Institutional Frameworks

In order to advance the understanding of which types of regional innovation system represent effective innovation support for what kinds of industry in different regions analyses must be contextualized by reference to the actual knowledge base of various industries as well as to the regional and national institutional framework, which strongly shape the innovation processes of firms. Of special importance is the linkage between the larger institutional frameworks of the national innovation and business systems, and the character of regional innovation systems. In making the arguments about a general correspondence between the macro-institutional characteristics of the economy and the dominant form and character of its regional innovation systems a link is provided to the literature on ‘varieties of capitalism’ and national business systems.     

Laws for Sale: Evidence from Russia

How does regulatory capture affect growth? We construct measuresof the political power of firms and regional regulatory captureusing microlevel data on the preferential treatment of firmsthrough regional laws and regulations in Russia during the period1992–2000. Using these measures, we find that: (1) politicallypowerful firms perform better on average; (2) a high level ofregulatory capture hurts the performance of firms that haveno political connections and boosts the performance of politicallyconnected firms; (3) capture adversely affects small-businessgrowth and the tax capacity of the state; and (4) there is noevidence that capture affects aggregate growth.

"oligarchy ... throws a close network of dependence relationshipsover all the economic and political institutions of present-daybourgeois society without exception... ." —Vladimir Lenin,"Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" (1916)

     

Social Capital and Satisfaction with Crime Control in Urban China

By applying the symbolic perspective to the context of Chinese urban society, this paper examines how three dimensions of social capital—social trust, social bonds, and social cohesion—are associated with satisfaction with crime control among Chinese urban residents. The individual-level data from the 2005 China General Social Survey (CGSS) are linked with provincial-level data on arrest rates and economic and demographic characteristics. The analysis shows that bridging trust and neighborhood cohesion are significantly positively related to satisfaction with crime control. The effects of bonding trust and social bonds on satisfaction with crime control are not significant. The results provide partial support for the symbolic theoretical perspective and extend our understandings of the impact of diverse forms of social capital on crime control attitudes to a non-Western context.     

The science commons in health research: structure,function, and value

The “science commons,” knowledge that is widely accessible at low or no cost, is a uniquely important input to scientific advance and cumulative technological innovation. It is primarily, although not exclusively, funded by government and nonprofit sources. Much of it is produced at academic research centers, although some academic science is proprietary and some privately funded R&D enters the science commons. Science in general aspires to Mertonian norms of openness, universality, objectivity, and critical inquiry. The science commons diverges from proprietary science primarily in being open and being very broadly available. These features make the science commons particularly valuable for advancing knowledge, for training innovators who will ultimately work in both public and private sectors, and in providing a common stock of knowledge upon which all players—both public and private—can draw readily. Open science plays two important roles that proprietary R&D cannot: it enables practical benefits even in the absence of profitable markets for goods and services, and its lays a shared foundation for subsequent private R&D. The history of genomics in the period 1992–2004, covering two periods when genomic startup firms attracted significant private R&D investment, illustrates these features of how a science commons contributes value. Commercial interest in genomics was intense during this period. Fierce competition between private sector and public sector genomics programs was highly visible. Seemingly anomalous behavior, such as private firms funding “open science,” can be explained by unusual business dynamics between established firms wanting to preserve a robust science commons to prevent startup firms from limiting established firms’ freedom to operate. Deliberate policies to create and protect a large science commons were pursued by nonprofit and government funders of genomics research, such as the Wellcome Trust and National Institutes of Health. These policies were crucial to keeping genomic data and research tools widely available at low cost.

The nature of innovation in emerging industries in China: an exploratory study

In China, traditional manufacturing industries have been world leaders in low-cost manufacturing for overseas multinationals. It is well-known that these “traditional industries” depend on overseas parent firms for innovation. In recent decades, China’s desire is to encourage and promote innovation-based emerging industries within its borders. By definition, “emerging industries” are composed of domestic Chinese firms without an overseas parent firm. We know very little about the innovation practices in these emerging Chinese industries; we hypothesize that the innovation practices in these firms are quite different from traditional Chinese industries with overseas parents. The Kunshan region in China has attracted both traditional and emerging industries that have contributed to unparalleled economic growth in the region. This is a significantly large region with a population of 1.65 million with a regional GDP of USD 32 billion (2010). In this study, we use survey data from companies in this thriving region to compare R&D and innovation practices of the firms in the traditional and emerging industries in this region. We do not know enough about the innovation practices of emerging industrial firms in China, who may have a profound influence on the industrial China of the future much like South Korean firms such as KIA, Hyundai, Samsung, etc. The findings of this exploratory study based on data collected from the Kunshan region enables us to recommend avenues for future research.     

Information transfer between an academic research center and its member firms

Many American universities have recently established research centers that interact with industrial firms. Such centers have been supported by the federal government whose objective is to enhance technological innovation. For this study, interviews were conducted with liaison persons from the member firms to determine how the firms acquire and use information obtained from the center and why they maintain a relationship with the center. The findings confirm that the center is a useful source of information for the member firms. It clarifies the need for establishing strategies that facilitate the transfer of information without compromising either the center or its members.     

Modernizing small manufacturers in Japan: The role of local public technology centers

Japan's hundreds of thousands of small manufacturing enterprises not only provide high-quality inputs to large Japanese companies, but also are becoming innovators and growth generators in their own right. In addition to help from larger customers, small Japanese companies can call upon an array of public support mechanisms, including about 170 local Kohsetsushi examination and technology centers which provide research, testing, training, and guidance for firms with under 300 employees. With their intensive geographical coverage, broad range of technical services, and nominal fees, these centers offer small Japanese firms a readily available and effective source of assistance to improve their manufacturing operations, technology, and products. After reviewing the changing context for small manufacturers in Japan, the article examines the role of local Kohsetsushi centers in small firm modernization. This article considers the history, organization, and services of the Kohsetsushi system, explores the operation of five case study centers, and discusses how small Japanese firms benefit from Kohsetsushi services. Finally, there is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the Kohsetsushi system.     

Patent cross-licensing,the influence of IP interdependency and the moderating effect of firm size

This paper analyzes technological interdependency as the key factor for companies’ motivation to engage in cross-licensing transactions. It gives evidence on how the incentive effects for mutual technology transfers vary by firm size and the degree to which a firm has to rely on its competitors’ intellectual property (IP dependency). Even though IP dependency exists also among smaller firms, cross-licensing has previously only been analyzed for large firms. This paper fills this gap in the empiric literature using original survey data among German manufacturing companies. Findings suggest that the influence of firm size and IP dependency on the use of cross-licensing can not be regarded separately. While the effect of IP dependency on the relevance of cross-licensing itself has a clear positive effect this seems to be true to a higher extent for small firms and decrease for larger companies. A possible reason for the interaction effect between these two factors is that larger firms have better odds of achieving a technological workaround which can serve as an alternative to in- or cross-licensing; furthermore small high tech firms might need to explicitly use cross-licensing to secure the freedom to operate while a large firm’s patent portfolio itself can serve as an implicit insurance by posing a threat which prevents other technology holders to file patent infringement cases.