Collaborative Research: DAT and MOD: The Division of Innovative Labor

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Innovation is becoming more open, often involving multiple organizations in a division of innovative labor (DoIL). The division of innovative labor in the economy is conceived of as the distribution across firms and other organizations of the following steps in the innovation process: 1) research/idea generation; 2) development; and 3) commercialization. Despite its importance, there is little broad-based, systematic evidence on the extent or nature of the DoIL, nor on its impact on firm performance or the rate of technical advance. The project collects the first systematic data on the DoIL for the United States by surveying over 20,000 firms in manufacturing and selected service industries,. The collected data quantifies key features of the DoIL. It also provides the basis for developing and empirically testing models of the DoIL and its effects on innovative performance. The project addresses a number of important questions, such as the extent to which startups, as compared to established firms, are generators of new ideas, the importance of universities as sources of industrial innovation, and the extent to which firms' use of external knowledge inputs increases their innovative performance. Finally, the research advances the economics of innovation by generating formal models that capture the DoIL and testing those models empirically. Broader Impacts: This project is the first national effort to collect data on innovative activity generally, going beyond R&D and patenting. It is an important addition to the data infrastructure required for a science of science and innovation policy. By generating new data on innovative activity, creating new metrics, and developing new models of the innovation process, the research also informs both public policy and firm strategy. The research should contribute to deliberations on intellectual property policy and policies on standards and cooperative research and development agreements that potentially affect the growth of technology markets and the DoIL. By highlighting the role of small firms, startups, and universities in the innovation process, the findings should also help inform federal support to university research and new firm formation. The project findings should also contribute to the federal government's ongoing efforts to improve its collection of data on industrial R&D and innovation. The research also contributes to the management of innovation by highlighting the returns to extramural knowledge sourcing, or strategic alliances formed to develop or commercialize new technologies.