The contrast between organization types has given rise to a growing literature on the commercialization of university research. But, much of this literature is based upon assumptions about the ways in which institutional context matters, while much of the innovation literature in general ignores institutional context altogether. Moreover, most studies of inter-organizational knowledge flows build upon formal alliances between organizations. Which such alliances are undoubtedly important, they do not necessarily capture the most important channels of knowledge diffusion out of universities – or even firms.

To address questions of institutions and innovation, I employ a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data to explore longitudinal trends in technology development and adoption. Qualitatively, I am trained as both an ethnographer and a historian, and I spend significant research time in various archives and “in the field” engaged in interviews and conversations with practitioners. Quantitatively, I employ large databases of patents and publications, which I use to construct networks between individuals, organizations and technologies themselves. I list the details of several recent and ongoing projects below.

[Return to home page]

Public and Private Science and the University/Firm Contrast

Dissertation: Institutional Convergence and the Diffusion of University- Versus Firm-Origin Technologies

Committee: Stephen Barley and Walter W. Powell (co-chairs), Kathleen Eisenhardt, Mark Granovetter
(Defended June 2007)

Recent innovation research has emphasized inter-organizational knowledge flows and has offered special attention to the role of universities in these knowledge networks. But, we have little empirical evidence of how competing institutional models shape knowledge diffusion networks for universities versus firms. To address this issue, I compare diffusion patterns for university- and firm-origin technologies in both biotechnology and digital audio. The study draws upon 3657 downstream patents and 7230 downstream publications to assess potential diffusion differences, and exploits 220 interviews with 112 different researchers and business managers to identify diffusion mechanisms and the considerations that affect their use.

I find that a technology’s organizational origin alone offers little insight into institutionally-conditioned diffusion processes. Instead, I identify diffusion mechanisms that hold across organizational contexts and I describe how these mechanisms build upon interpersonal networks. These interpersonal networks, which feature rampant crossing of organizational boundaries, are the critical structures that enable the diffusion of knowledge and they shape how individual researchers in each organizational context respond to the competing demands of public science and private science. These results demonstrate how institutions condition the movement of knowledge between organizations – both from the university to the firm and from the firm to the university – and they encourage a richer conceptualization of institutions that embraces intra-organizational complexity and that highlights the role of personal networks in transcending institutional dichotomies and thereby fostering hybrid organizational forms.

University versus Firm Collaboration and the Institutions of Public and Private Science

Innovation scholars have come to emphasize interorganizational networks as the “locus of innovation.” But, while studies of networks and organizational alliances have proliferated, scholars have offered relatively little attention to how different types of organizations within these networks approach collaboration. In this paper, I question how the institutions of “public science” and “private science,” and their respective emphases on credit and money, influence university and firm collaboration rates and strategies. I draw upon a sample of a 6888 publications and 2337 patents stemming from core techniques in biotechnology, assessing collaboration at both the individual and organizational level. In order to develop an understanding of how participants conceive of collaboration opportunities and challenges, I also analyze 45 interviews with scientists and business managers who work directly with these techniques. The results highlight the vast prevalence of collaborative arrangements and the common benefits resulting from collaboration, including access to specific knowledge, participation in general knowledge-sharing networks, division of labor and refinement of ideas. But, public science and private science impose different costs for collaboration, such that organizations are least collaborative around their dominant output forms; thus, firm publications are more collaborative than those from universities, while the situation is reversed for patents. I discuss the organizational network structure that results from these different incentives and point to the importance of public science organizations in serving as the “glue” of collaborative networks.

Cacophony or Harmony?: Multivocal Logics and Technology Licensing by the Stanford University Department of Music

Industrial and Corporate Change 14:1, pp. 93-118.

Amongst Stanford University’s most profitable technology licenses lies an odd entry: frequency modulation synthesis. The license is unusual in that it came not from the School of Medicine or the School of Engineering, but rather the music department. Indeed, the Stanford music department boasts a portfolio of nearly three-dozen patents, along with a trademark program and several industrial affiliates. This paper explores the institutional features that facilitated the rise of technical and commercial logics within the department. I examine the initial framing of these novel activities in terms of musical composition, and the subsequent interaction between technical, commercial and musical logics over a thirty-year period. Ultimately, positive feedbacks between the various logics have led to a mutual dependence, solidifying the centrality of musical composition within the department while underscoring the complementary role of technical and commercial endeavors.

Measurement of Innovation

Do Patents Really Capture Innovation? What License and Publication Data Tell Us About Patents as an Indicator

Patents are one of the most common proxies for innovation that researchers employ. Nevertheless, questions remain as to the efficacy of patents and patent citations in truly capturing innovation. On one hand, patents may under-represent innovation since not all innovations are patented. On the other hand, patents may over-represent innovation since not all patented inventions enter into use and become economically relevant innovations. In this paper, I compare patent data surrounding a key biotechnology invention to two other measures: technology licenses and publications. Licenses represent a highly accurate indicator of innovation since licensors strive to ensure that all downstream innovators sign a license for use of a technology, regardless of whether of not they patent it or choose to cite the licensor’s technology in their patent. Publications likewise represent an alternative representation of innovative activity that is independent of intellectual property strategies and exogenous policy shocks that influence these strategies. Comparison of the three measures raises serious questions about the efficacy of patent data for capturing innovation and encourages the use of multiple indicators of innovation.

Economics of Technology, Historical Influence and Lock-In

Path Dependence, Path-Constrained Melioration and User Group Tensions in Electronic Music Technology Development

While the strategic management literature offers widespread attention to path dependence in the selection of standards and to actions that a firm may take to influence this outcome, this same literature offers less discussion of downstream technological developments following “lock-in” to a particular standard. Such investigations are important for at least two reasons. First, as follow-on applications become more and more removed from justifications for settling on a standard for its initial application, the potential inefficiencies in the process may become more and more significant. Second, to the extent that multiple equilibria inherent to a path dependent system may give rise to selection of a suboptimal standard, it is important to investigate steps that innovative firms may take within a path to address these shortcomings while still adhering to the standard. These steps may be termed “path-constrained melioration.” To provide a rich example of such processes, this article describes the evolution of the musical keyboard, its later application to electronic synthesizers, and the steps taken to address problems that arise as a consequence of the coupling of keyboard and synthesizer. Significantly, the example illustrates a tension between two target communities of users: the expert musicians and the mass consumers of musical instruments, the former harmed by the latter’s dominance in the market and the latter imposing a negative externality on their future selves should they aspire towards greater expertise. I conclude with implications for firms’ research and development strategies.

Lessons from the International Diffusion of Early Railroad Signaling Technologies

In addressing the enormous information management challenges presented by traffic control on nineteenth-century railways, the United States and United Kingdom employed different techniques to address very similar challenges. One result of this was a significant difference in injury and accident rates between the two countries, the British enjoying safer railways. This essay investigates the first century of railroad signaling systems, whose function was to manage the physical location of trains, ensuring separation for safety while addressing the often-competing demand for economy. I first explain the rise in the need for signaling and provide an overview of railroad signaling developments. I then highlight a variety of economic, political and cultural factors that influenced decisions regarding signaling adoption, and which help us to understand adoption discrepancies. Moreover, the durability of installations meant that early timing differences had a lasting effect upon later evaluations of signaling advances. Ultimately, I argue that railroad safety, in so far as it was influenced by signaling, was the result of specific conditions in each country that were largely exogenous to safety itself.

Entrepreneurship Education and Technology Transfer

Organizational Modularity and Intra-University Relationships Between Entrepreneurship Education and Technology Transfer
(with Tom Byers)

in University Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer: Process, Design, and Intellectual Property (Gary Libecap, ed.) Stamford: Elsevier Science/JAI Press, pp. 275-311.

Both entrepreneurship education and commercialization of university research have witnessed remarkable growth in the past two decades. These activities may be complementary in many respects, as when participation in an entrepreneurship program prepares a student to start a company based on university technology, or when technology transfer personnel provide resources and expertise for an entrepreneurship course. At the same time, however, the activities are distinct along a number of dimensions, including goals and mission, influence of market conditions, time horizon, assessment, and providers and constituency. We argue that this situation presents an organizational dilemma: How should entrepreneurship and technology transfer groups within a university maintain independence in recognition of their differences while still facilitating synergies resulting from overlapping areas of concern? In response to this dilemma, we draw on the organizational modularity perspective, which offers the normative prescription that such situations warrant autonomy for individual units, but also require a high degree of cross-unit awareness in order to capture synergies. To illustrate this perspective in an intra-university population of entrepreneurship and technology transfer groups, we present network images and statistics of inter-group relationships at Stanford University, which is widely recognized for its success in both activities. The results highlight that dependence between groups is minimal, such that groups retain autonomy in decision-making and are not dependent on others to complete their goals. Simultaneously, cross-unit awareness is high, such that groups have frequent formal and informal interactions and communication. This awareness facilitates mutually beneficial interactions between groups. As a demonstration of the actual functioning of this system, we present three thumbnail case studies that highlight positive relationships between entrepreneurship education and technology transfer. Ultimately, we argue that to fully realize the synergies between entrepreneurship education and technology transfer, we must also recognize differences between them and ensure the autonomy that such differences warrant.

[Return to home page]