We examine the impact of individual-level motives upon innovative effort and performance in firms. Drawing from economics and social psychology, we develop a model of the impact of individuals' motives and incentives upon their innovative effort and performance. Using data on over 11,000...

Scholarly work seeking to understand academics' commercial activities often draws on abstract notions of the institution of science and of the representative scientist. Few scholars have examined whether and how scientists' motives to engage in commercial activities differ across fields....

We examine whether startups attract employees with different pecuniary and non-pecuniary motives than small or large established firms. We then explore whether such differences in employee motives lead to differences in innovative performance across firm types. Using data on over 10,000 U.S. R&D...

Prior research has shown that immigrants make important contributions to US innovation and are more likely than natives to become entrepreneurs. However, there is little evidence on how foreign and native high-skilled workers differ prior to entering the workforce. Moreover, little attention has...

Our results paint a complex picture of academic and industrial science. While we find significant industry-academia differences with respect to all four dimensions, we also observe remarkable similarities. For example, both academic institutions and private firms appear to allow their scientists...

Crowdfunding may provide much-needed financial resources, yet there is little systematic evidence on the potential of crowdfunding for scientific research. We first briefly review prior research on crowdfunding and give an overview of dedicated platforms for crowdfunding research. We then...

Even though teams have become the dominant mode of knowledge production, little is known regarding how they divide work among their members. Conceptualizing knowledge production as a process involving a number of functional activities, we first develop a conceptual framework to study the...

Based on a survey questionnaire administered to 1478 R&D labs in the U.S. manufacturing sector in 1994, we find that firms typically protect the profits due to invention with a range of mechanisms, including patents, secrecy, lead time advantages and the use of complementary marketing and...

Using data from the Federal Trade Commission's Line of Business Program and survey measures of technological opportunity and appropriability conditions, this paper finds that overall firm size has a very small, statistically in- significant effect on business unit R & D intensity when either...

We study how the inventive capability of a firm conditions its participation in a division of innovative labor. Capable firms are, by definition, able to invent; for them, external inventions substitute for their own R&D. However, external knowledge is an input into internal invention, and thus,...