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The Changing Frontier

Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, founder of Raytheon and one-time engineering dean at MIT, delivered a report to the president of the United States that argued for the importance of public support for science, and the importance of science for the future of the nation. The report, Science: The Endless Frontier, set America on a path toward strong and well-funded institutions of science, creating an intellectual architecture that still defines scientific endeavor today.

In The Changing Frontier, Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin Jones bring together a group of prominent scholars to consider the changes in science and innovation in the ensuing decades. The contributors take on such topics as changes in the organization of scientific research, the geography of innovation, modes of entrepreneurship, and the structure of research institutions and linkages between science and innovation. An important analysis of where science stands today, The Changing Frontier will be invaluable to practitioners and policy makers alike.

440 pages | 6 halftones, 97 line drawings, 66 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2015

National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report

Economics and Business: Business--Industry and Labor, Economics--Development, Growth, Planning

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction
Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin F. Jones

I. The Organization of Scientific Research

 1. Why and Wherefore of Increased Scientific Collaboration
Richard B. Freeman, Ina Ganguli, and Raviv Murciano- Goroff

 2. The (Changing) Knowledge Production Function: Evidence from the MIT Department of Biology for 1970‒2000 49
Annamaria Conti and Christopher C. Liu

 3. Collaboration, Stars, and the Changing Organization of Science: Evidence from Evolutionary Biology
Ajay Agrawal, John McHale, and Alexander Oettl
Comment: Julia Lane

 4. Credit History: The Changing Nature of Scientific Credit
Joshua S. Gans and Fiona Murray

II. The Geography of Innovation

 5. The Rise of International Coinvention
Lee Branstetter, Guangwei Li, and Francisco Veloso

 6. Information Technology and the Distribution of Inventive Activity
Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, and Shane Greenstein

III. Entrepreneurship and Market- Based Innovation

 7. Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy
Ramana Nanda, Ken Younge, and Lee Fleming

 8. Economic Value Creation in Mobile Applications
Timothy F. Bresnahan, Jason P. Davis, and Pai- Ling Yin

 9. State Science Policy Experiments
Maryann Feldman and Lauren Lanahan

IV. Historical Perspectives on Science Institutions and Paradigms

 10. The Endless Frontier: Reaping What Bush Sowed?
Paula Stephan
Comment: Bruce A. Weinberg

 11. Algorithms and the Changing Frontier
Hezekiah Agwara, Philip Auerswald, and Brian Higginbotham
Comment: Timothy Simcoe

Contributors
Author Index
Subject Index
 

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