What makes companies pursue an Open Science strategy?

Whereas recent scholarly research has provided many insights about universities engaging in commercial activities, there is still little empirical evidence regarding the opposite phenomenon of companies disseminating scientific knowledge. Our paper aims to fill this gap and explores the motivations of firms that disclose research outcomes in a scientific format. Besides considering a dimension internal to the firm, we focus particularly on knowledge sourcing from academic institutions and the appropriability regime. We conduct an econometric analysis with firm-level data from the fourth edition of the French innovation survey (CIS) and matched scientific publications for a sample of 2512 R&D performing firms from all manufacturing sectors. This analysis provides evidence that firms are more likely to adopt academic principles if they need to access scientific knowledge that is considered important for their innovation development, whereas the mere existence of collaborative links with academic institutions is not a strong determinant. Furthermore, the results suggest that the inclination of firms to publish is sensitive to the level of knowledge spillovers in a sector and the effectiveness of legal appropriation instruments. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

The performance impact of intra-firm organizational design on an alliance's NPD projects

Yuosre Badir, Christopher Tucci

This research contributes to the intra-organization, inter-organization, and new product development (NPD) management literature by studying the impact of a firm's internal organizational design on the communication within and performance of NPD projects conducted with strategic alliance partners. The empirical data were collected from three in-depth case studies of network lead companies (NLCs) operating in different industries. The three NLCs have different internal organizational designs, ranging from very flexible "organic" to very rigid "mechanistic." In each NLC, a successful new-to-firm product development project was chosen for further detailed investigation. First, we identify the role the alliance's NPD project characteristics and industry characteristics play in determining the "intensity level" and "media richness" of communication required between the alliance's NPD project partners. Then, we examine how the internal organizational design influences the actual intensity and media richness of communication of the alliance's NPD project that matches our assumptions of what is required. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Elsevier2009

Three essays on the role of proximity in science and innovation

Stefano Horst Baruffaldi

This thesis proposes three studies that provide novel empirical evidence on how different types of proximity can affect innovation and science activities through various mechanisms and in different contexts. In the first study (second chapter of this thesis), in collaboration with Julio Raffo, we analyze the relationship between geography and the likelihood of duplication in inventive activities. We argue that the uneven diffusion of knowledge means that the duplication of inventions will not be randomly distributed geographically and over time. First, as knowledge diffuses over time and competitive incentives decrease, the probability of a claimed invention duplicating an existing one will decrease in the time distance between the two. Second, for recent and upcoming inventions, competitive incentives are high, and localized knowledge flows increase the probability of duplication. Therefore, over a brief time period, the probability of duplication decreases with geographic distance. Conversely, the duplication of less recent inventions is more likely to occur at long distances as a consequence of less awareness of a technology existing due to missing knowledge flows. We test our hypotheses on European Patent Office (EPO) patent bibliographical data on patent citation categories. Geographic distance matters significantly less in sectors in which patents are known to be more effective as a source of information such as discrete technologies. In the second study (third chapter), in collaboration with Annamaria Conti and Fabiana Visentin, we investigate the effects of professorsâ social proximity with external universities on the level of productivity of PhD students hired from these universities. Researchers hired from external environments tend to have high scientific productivity compared to those who completed their studies in the same institution where they are employed. In a population of 4,666 PhD students, we further study the scientific productivity of external students from professorsâ networks, defined as students with a master's degree from a different university from that of their PhD, and also from a university with which their supervisors' co-authors are affiliated. We find that these students are significantly more productive, both compared to other students with a master's degree from a different university, and to students with a master's degree from the same university as that of their PhD. In our analyses, we control for the heterogeneity of supervisors and the heterogeneity of institutions where the students obtained their master's degrees, including proxies for the specific relevance of these universities for a given supervisor. Thus, we conclude that professors hire students with higher scientific productivity from universities where their co-authors are affiliated. Additional analyses further suggest that the reduction of information asymmetries is the main mechanism to explain this finding. In the third study (fourth chapter), in collaboration with Guillaume Burghouwt, we investigate the role of interregional knowledge integration as a driver of firm innovative performance. We adopt an unbalanced panel of 3,871 innovative companies in Germany between 1992 and 2010, for a total of 15,819 observations, and we study their innovative productivity. [...]