CAREER: The Emergence and Ramifications of the United States Knowledge Economy

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

SES-0545634 Jason Owen-Smith University of Michigan This CAREER project examines organizational efforts to innovate using networks under constraints imposed by the expectations of public (stock market) and private (venture capital) investors in order to explain how the high-technology industries that comprise the U.S. Knowledge Economy (USKE) have come to be characterized by distinctive markets for technology and capital. Markets, which emerge as actors forge relationships and stake out positions that shape their future opportunities and outcomes, are social environments that define and coordinate economic action. Within the USKE, different industrial markets arise as organizations seek novel information that will enable technological innovation through their networks while striving for the recognition of investors and analysts. This project will demonstrate the important relationship between inter-organizational networks and institutional fields in three related analyses that seek to explain: (1) inter-industry variations in the effect organizational networks and identities exert on financial and innovative outcomes; (2) the behavioral sources of those distinct industrial markets; and (3) the appearance and effects of radical innovations that sometimes emerge when different industrial orders collide. Broader Impacts In addition to making fundamental contributions to theoretical and substantive knowledge about innovation, industrial change, and the social underpinnings of economic life, this research effort will generate a unique dataset that can serve as a resource for scholarly investigation in multiple fields. Conducting these analyses requires the collection of a longitudinal dataset that matches institutional features of industries, organizational characteristics and dynamic relational data with a panel of innovative and financial outcomes for multiple related industries. This data collection effort will cover an estimated 4,665 organizations in the 72 most research intensive industrial classifications and their partners for a 31 year period stretching from 1975 to 2005. The project also contributes to the development of an interdisciplinary undergraduate program and infrastructure for research and teaching as well as providing systematically validated substantive knowledge to the public and to policy makers in a number of arenas. Corporate managers and public sector research administrators, state and local policy makers seeking tighter linkages between technological and economic development, and federal agencies tasked to expand national scientific, technological, and economic competitiveness will be well served by research that examines innovation and organizational outcomes across numerous industries. The project's focus on collaborative networks at the cutting edge of science and technology will also contribute to ongoing efforts to understand and develop tools to support large scale, inter-disciplinary collaborations and technology development efforts that span industry and academe.