COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Research funding, organizational context, and transformative research: New insights from new methods and data

A major goal of research funding is to support transformative science. A challenge to achieving this goal, however, is determining what kinds of research funding will lead to such transformations. This work examines the extent to which funding acts to change the organizational context within which research takes place and how that stimulates transformative science. The results of this work will help inform the practice of both science and innovation policy by building better understanding of such organizational factors as team size, composition, seniority and gender in stimulating innovation. The resulting practical insights should help inform how to direct funding to support collaborative networks and support the careers of junior and female scientists. Access will be available through both the Virtual Data Enclave at the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science and the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers; the work should act as magnet for junior researchers who are developing their career research agendas.

The analysis is made possible by a new longitudinal dataset containing information about research scientists, their organizations, their career trajectories and their productivity--particularly their patenting activity. A major innovation is a new method that measures transformativeness by capturing the degree to which new ideas in the patents make existing work obsolete. The combination of the new data and new methods are used to (1) describe the broader formal and informal context within which research takes place, (2) characterize transformational research, and (3) describe the link between the two. The econometric approach makes use of two novel instruments - quasi-random variation in the geographic and organizational distribution of potential collaborators both within and outside of an institution - to control for potential selection and other confounding factors.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.