Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Ed Mansfield wrote several papers on the private returns to basic research (e.g. Mansfield, 1980) and the influence of academic research on industrial innovation (e.g. Mansfield, 1991). We extend this line of research by assessing the impact of university research on total factor productivity growth of Italian manufacturing firms. The econometric analysis is based on reduced-form estimation of the R&D capital stock model, including controls for two potential sources of sample selection bias, as proposed by Crepon (1998) and Piga and Vivarelli (2004). Our results suggest that while there are positive returns to collaborative research with other firms, collaborative research with universities does not appear to directly stimulate productivity. We interpret this result as consistent with recent evidence (e.g. Hall 2001, 2003) suggesting that firms engage in collaborative research with universities when appropriability conditions are weak.

We focus on two themes, among those in Mansfield’s work, particularly relevant to understanding the role of large corporations in the U.S. innovation system: (1) the development of science-based inventions into market-ready innovations, and (2) the imitation by one firm of another’s technology. Both of these phenomena, we propose, depend critically on the extent of technological and organizational complexity characteristic of current products and potential innovations. Reporting on recent survey research of our own, we argue that the origins and potentially the future of U.S. leadership in technology-based economic growth lie in the complementarity of large corporations and entrepreneurial startups, each exploring and exploiting the market potential of different types of science-based innovations.

This paper develops a model to analyze behavior and welfare effects of a research and production joint venture (JV). In the model, a research dollar is more productive if spent in the joint venture because it increases the achievable probability of new product introduction. This efficiency of research and production joint ventures offsets, to some degree, the loss due to higher consumer prices. For some parameter configurations and joint venture membership rules, research and production joint ventures yield higher social welfare than research-only joint ventures (RJVs). This contrasts with some of the industrial organization literature on research collaboration and with traditional antitrust views.

This paper describes trends and characteristics of the membership of RJVs in the United States.

This paper looks more closely at the sources of patent growth in the United States since 1984. It confirms that the increase is largely due to U.S. patenters, with an earlier surge in Asia, and some increase in Europe. Growth has taken place in all technologies, but not in all industries, being concentrated in the electrical, electronics, computing, and scientific instruments industries. It then examines whether these patents are valued by the market. We know from survey evidence that patents in these industries are not usually considered important for appropriability, but are sometimes considered necessary to secure financing for entering the industry. I compare the market value of patents held by entrant firms to those held by incumbents (controlling for R&D). Using data on publicly traded firms 1980–1989, I find that in industries based on electrical and mechanical technologies the market value of entrants’ patents is positive in the post-1984 period (after the patenting surge), but not before, when patents were relatively unimportant in these industries. Also, the value of patent rights in complex product industries (where each product relies on many patents held by a number of other firms) is much higher for entrants than incumbents in the post-1984 period. For discrete product industries (where each product relies on only a few patents, and where the importance of patents for appropriability has traditionally been higher), there is no difference between incumbents and entrants.

This paper explores one of Edwin Mansfield’s enduring interests: the interface between academia and industry. It highlights some key lessons regarding the management of university-based spin-outs, drawing on a variety of sources. I highlight the challenges that the spin-off process poses, the impracticality of directly financing firms through internal venture funds, and the ways in which universities can add value to faculty ventures.

For over the past twenty years, the United States has witnessed a pro-patent movement. In response, numerous concerns have been raised, including possible impediments to innovation in cumulative technologies, emergence of anti-commons, barriers to entry and an elevation of costs of innovation associated with defensive patenting, growth in patent litigation and poor quality patents. Although there is little systematic evidence that these concerns have materialized in any substantial way, vigilance is nonetheless warranted.

Recent initiatives by a number of OECD governments suggest considerable interest in emulating the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, a piece of legislation that is widely credited with stimulating significant growth in university-industry technology transfer and research collaboration in the US. We examine the effects of Bayh-Dole on university-industry collaboration and technology transfer in the US, emphasizing the lengthy history of both activities prior to 1980 and noting the extent to which these activities are rooted in the incentives created by the unusual scale and structure (by comparison with Western Europe or Japan) of the US higher education system. Efforts at “emulation” of the Bayh-Dole policy elsewhere in the OECD are likely to have modest success at best without greater attention to the underlying structural differences among the higher education systems of these nations.

This paper explores why finance constraints may impact upon the inter firm diffusion of new technology, incorporates these arguments in a hazard rate formulation of a diffusion model and then estimates that model using data relating to the adoption of CNC machine tools in the UK. The results indicate that financial constraints can be a significant factor in the diffusion process.

The analysis of the diffusion of innovation was a central theme in Ed Mansfield’s work over many years. In this essay I summarise his analysis of logistic diffusion processes and relate his work to earlier studies of industrial retardation and subsequent work on evolutionary economic processes. A distinction has to be drawn between the logistic law and the logistic curve, the latter being only one instantiation of the more general law which is itself a signature of evolutionary selection processes within a population of rival innovations.