Made in academia: The effect of institutional origin on inventors' attention to science

Inventors cannot exploit new scientific discoveries if they do not pay attention to them. However, allocating attention to science is difficult because the scientific literature is complex, vast, fast-changing, and often unreliable. Inventors are therefore likely to rely on informational cues when s...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Bikard, M. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: INFORMS Inst.for Operations Res.and the Management Sciences 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
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001 10.1287-orsc.2018.1206
008 220706s2018 CNT 000 0 und d
020 |a 10477039 (ISSN) 
245 1 0 |a Made in academia: The effect of institutional origin on inventors' attention to science 
260 0 |b INFORMS Inst.for Operations Res.and the Management Sciences  |c 2018 
856 |z View Fulltext in Publisher  |u https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1206 
520 3 |a Inventors cannot exploit new scientific discoveries if they do not pay attention to them. However, allocating attention to science is difficult because the scientific literature is complex, vast, fast-changing, and often unreliable. Inventors are therefore likely to rely on informational cues when screening new publications. I posit that inventors pay significantly less attention to discoveries "made in academia" than to those "made in industry" because they believe that the work of academic scientists will be less useful to them. I test this proposition by examining inventors' patent references to the scientific literature in the case of simultaneous discoveries made by at least one team based in academia and another based in industry. I find that inventors are 23% less likely to cite the academic paper than its "twin" from industry. My results highlight the importance of inventors' attention as a previously underexplored bottleneck shaping the translation of science into new technologies. © 2018 INFORMS. 
650 0 4 |a Academic science 
650 0 4 |a Attention 
650 0 4 |a Innovation 
650 0 4 |a Patents 
650 0 4 |a Simultaneous discoveries 
650 0 4 |a Use of science in inventions 
700 1 |a Bikard, M.  |e author 
773 |t Organization Science