Funding of science | EPFL Graph Search

Research funding is a term generally covering any funding for scientific research, in the areas of natural science, technology, and social science. Different methods can be used to disburse funding, but the term often connotes funding obtained through a competitive process, in which potential research projects are evaluated and only the most promising receive funding. It is often measured via Gross domestic expenditure on R&D (GERD). Most research funding comes from two major sources: corporations (through research and development departments) and government (primarily carried out through universities and specialized government agencies; often known as research councils). A smaller amount of scientific research is funded by charitable foundations, especially in relation to developing cures for diseases such as cancer, malaria, and AIDS. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), more than 60% of research and development in scientific and technical

Corporate Science, Innovation, and Firm Value

Markus Simeth

Many firms actively disclose research findings in scientific peer-reviewed journals. The literature highlights several potential benefits of such scientific boundary-spanning activities, including privileged access to academic information networks. However, scientific disclosure may lead to unintended knowledge spillovers. It remains unclear whether active engagement in science leads to higher returns. This paper investigates the impact of scientific activities on the firm’s market value, using accounting data for US firms and matched patent and scientific publication data. We find evidence for the positive impact of scientific publications on a firm’s market value beyond the effects of R&D, patent stocks and patent quality and also document heterogeneity with respect to this impact between different industrial sectors.

EPFL Working Paper Series2013

Corporate Science and Voluntary Disclosure

Markus Simeth

The dissertation investigates the phenomenon of firms that make voluntary contributions to the stock of scientific knowledge. Such a firm behaviour appears counterintuitive from a traditional viewpoint, since no direct financial returns can be expected while the disclosure of research outcomes may lead to knowledge spillovers to competing firms. This raises the questions why firms engage in those boundary-spanning activities, how scientific disclosure strategies are implemented, and to what extent scientific disclosure strategies affect the firm performance. The dissertation provides empirical evidence on these questions using representative firm-level data and econometric analysis techniques. The first chapter of the dissertation reviews the relevant literature, underlines the relevance of doing research on this topic by providing descriptive evidence on the amounts of scientific contributions by firms, and includes some novel insights from interviews which I conducted at several large R&D performing firms. I discuss the potential benefits, costs and organizational challenges of scientific disclosure strategies and position scientific publications as an expression of openness in the light of alternative openness definitions prevalent in innovation research. The second chapter focuses on the question why firms publish in scientific journals using a cost-benefit framework. In particular, I analyse whether scientific contributions of firms are used as an instrument to get access to academic knowledge networks. Moreover, I explore environmental conditions by considering the effectiveness of appropriation instruments and the spillover levels in a sector that may impact the firms’ decision-making process. The analysis relies on data from the French Innovation survey and provides evidence for the predictions that firms show reciprocal behaviour in exchange of obtaining valuable academic knowledge. However, the propensity of firms to publish is rather sensitive to the spillover threats. The third chapter examines how are firms able to publish by testing the requirements and origins of scientific contributions by firms. I explicitly consider the heterogeneity of scientific outputs and provide a complementary view on the requirements for the creation of inventive outcomes. The requirements considered can be classified according to the research orientation and the demographic composition of the R&D labs. The analysis revealed that scientific disclosure strategies require specific resource allocations and capabilities, which are in part not necessary for the generation of inventive outcomes. The findings support the view that disclosure strategies can be costly and are not only a by-product of the “usual” R&D activities. The fourth chapter addresses the performance effects of scientific activities of firms. More specifically, I examine whether scientific publications stocks provide valuable information to the financial markets, potentially leading to different valuations. I consider the heterogeneity of scientific and inventive outcomes and found evidence for a positive impact of scientific contributions on the firm’s Tobin’s Q beyond the effects of R&D stocks, patent stocks and patent quality.

EPFL2013

Population receptive field size in (un)crowding: to isolate or to combine?

Bogdan Draganski, Michael Herzog, Maya Anna Jastrzebowska, Ayberk Ozkirli

Traditional models posit that visual processing is local and feedforward. In this vein, crowding is explained to be the result of pooling of target and flanker features in early visual areas. Specifically, it has been suggested that when the target and flankers fall within the same receptive field, their features are pooled together, resulting in an irreversible loss of information and degraded performance. A recent fMRI study investigated the relation between crowding strength and population receptive field (pRF) sizes (He et al., 2019). The authors reported that stronger crowding coincides with larger pRF sizes in V2, suggesting that pooling occurs in V2. Here, we investigated pRF size in crowding, no crowding and uncrowding, in which adding flankers leads to improvements in target discrimination, contrary to what traditional models of crowding predict. We replicated previous findings of increased pRF size in crowding as compared to no crowding, with pronounced differences throughout early visual areas (V1 to V4, not only V2). Surprisingly, uncrowding coincides with the smallest pRF size, even compared to the no crowding condition, in which behavioral performance is best. Thus, pRF size is modulated by global context and the relationship between pRF size and behavioral performance is non-monotonic. Our findings suggest that pRF size is modulated by top-down feedback, which goes against the classic, purely feedforward models of crowding. We propose that pRFs are the means by which the brain either combines or isolates the target and the flankers – reflected in behavioral performance as crowding and uncrowding, respectively. [We would like to thank our funding sources: Swiss National Science Foundation (176153, http://p3.snf.ch/Project-176153; NCCR Synapsy, project grant numbers 32003B_135679, 32003B_159780, 324730_192755 and CRSK-3_190185), Leenaards Foundation, ROGER DE SPOELBERCH and Partridge Foundations.]

SAGE Publishing2021

Corporate Science and Voluntary Disclosure

Markus Simeth

EPFL2013

Population receptive field size in (un)crowding: to isolate or to combine?

Bogdan Draganski, Michael Herzog, Maya Anna Jastrzebowska, Ayberk Ozkirli

SAGE Publishing2021