Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to claim that it is useful to assess the web connectivity of research groups, describe hyperlink‐based techniques to achieve this and present brief details of European life sciences research groups as a case study. Design/methodology/approach – A...

In this chapter, guest author Dr. Randy Burd discusses the conditions that both promote and hinder innovation in the life sciences. Burd presents his personal observations of how the traditional academic model fails to fully encourage academic innovation, and in doing so illuminates the cultural...

Evolutionary developmental biology is a highly variable scientific innovation because researchers can adapt their involvement in the innovation to the opportunities provided by their environment. On the basis of comparative case studies in four countries, we link epistemic properties of research...

This paper examines the determinants of patenting and spin-off creation using survey data of 479 researchers in engineering and 449 researchers in life sciences funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). The results show that research novelty and...

The growing peer effects literature pays particular attention to the role of stars. We decompose the causal effect of hiring a star in terms of the productivity impact on: 1) co-located incumbents and 2) new recruits. Using longitudinal university department-level data we report that hiring a...

We report a puzzling pair of facts concerning the organization of science. The concentration of research output is declining at the department level but increasing at the individual level. For example, in evolutionary biology, over the period 1980 to 2000, the fraction of citation-weighted...

The growing peer effects literature pays particular attention to the role of stars. We decompose the causal effect of hiring a star in terms of the productivity impact on: 1) co-located incumbents and 2) new recruits. Using longitudinal university department-level data we report that hiring a...

This paper considers the drivers of the structure and evolution of the life sciences innovation system, a remarkable success story for public support of science. The growth and performance of this system reflect the interaction between abundant scientific and technological opportunity, a...

This paper is a comment on Finding the Endless Frontier: Lessons from the Life Sciences Innovation System for Technology Policy by Iain M. Cockburn and Scott Stern which can be found at: "http://ssrn.com/abstract=2208693" http://ssrn.com/abstract=2208693