America's most innovative firms participate in the U.S. Commerce Department's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) those that participated at least once accounted for over 40 percent of U.S. patents to U.S. entities during 1988-1996. Many firms are repeat participants. ATP participation has...

Data availability is arguably the greatest impediment to advancing the science of science and innovation policy and practice (SciSIPP). This paper describes the contents, methodology and use of the public online COMETS (Connecting Outcome Measures in Entrepreneurship Technology and Science)...

Research on intellectual property has focused on formal legally recorded rights that we call deeded, most often measured by granted patents. Meanwhile, other "defacto" IP (mainly purposive secrecy and natural excludability) has become more important because of the increasing closeness of...

Research on the nanoscale has revolutionized areas of science and has begun to have an impact on, and be impacted by, society and economy. We are capturing early traces of these processes in NanoBank, a large scale, multi-year project to provide a public data resource which will link individuals...

Population ecology models are elegant in form and adequate in describing aggregate data, but poor in telling stories and predicting the location of growth. Fundamentals models emphasizing the variables central to resource mobilization, such as intellectual human capital, can predict where and...

We examine the effects of university-based star scientists on three measures of performance for California biotechnology enterprises: the number of products in development, the number of products on the market, and changes in employment. The `star' concept which Zucker, Darby, and Brewer (1994)...

The local academic science base plays a dominant role in determining where and when biotechnology is adopted by existing firms or -- much more frequently -- exploited by new entrants in the U.S. In Japan this new dominant technology has almost exclusively been introduced through organizational...

Firms invest differentially in the intellectual human capital required to recognize, evaluate, and utilize technological breakthroughs occurring outside the firm. Such differential investment has been crucial in explaining which incumbent pharmaceutical firms have successfully transformed their...

This paper examines the value of collecting archival data to evaluate the Advanced Technology Program's (ATP) impact on participants' short- and long-term business success. We use two types of indicators of business success: patenting activity which can be tracked for all participants, and...

Commercializing knowledge involves transfer from discovering scientists to those who will develop it commercially. New codes and formulae describing discoveries develop slowly - with little incentive if value is low and many competing opportunities if high. Hence new knowledge remains naturally...