Research innovation and collaboration in government-funded science

Abstract

The share of government R&D spending is losing ground compared to that of industry spending. As such, a critical question arises as to the role of governments in scientific and technological advances. This dissertation explores the mechanism underlying government-funded research impact in the view of innovation and collaboration. The first study illustrates that a paper combining diverse research subjects disrupts sciences more when supported by government funding agencies within the same government department, using US federally funded papers published between 1975 and 2005 in biomedical and life sciences. The second study find that inventions that relied on government-funded research reduced the risk of new technological exploration, analyzing US patents granted between 1977 and 2010. In particular, the exploration risk is the most alleviated for inventions that relied on government-funded science, followed by those that relied on government-funded patents and those that did not rely on any government-funded research. The last study shows that knowledge creation differs by the compositional diversity of lab members who often conduct government-funded research. The results based on a survey of 300 members from 46 labs at a research-oriented university are that demographic diversity is negatively related to individual explicit knowledge, but has an inverted U-shaped relationship with individual tacit knowledge. These findings show that government-funded research enhances scientific and technological advances that involve many complicated interpersonal interactions.