Reading Summary Week 3, 09/15/2015

Innovation Management & Strategy (MSB510), By Prof. Kim WonJoon

Prepared by : Riri Kusumarani /20155636

Brooks, Harvey. 1994. “The Relationship between Science and Technology.” Research Policy 23(5): 477-486.

Key Research Question and Main Finding :

Both Science and Technology is influencing each other mutually and at the same time affecting

technological innovation.

Main discussion in Literature Review

The literature review nicely describe relationship between science and technology and vice versa. Brooks attempted to give example on how science is contributing to technology in 6 ways and also how technology is affecting science in 2 ways.

In introduction, the writer explains about pipeline model of how science contributes to technology in such a way that every product of science move along the line from applied research, design, manufacturing, commercialization and finally marketing.

By given out example, Brooks’ article can be understood easily. Science contributes to technology in the following approaches with examples:

- Direct source of new technological ideas o Uranium fission leads to concept of nuclear chain reaction o Bell laboratories exploration on semiconductors was motivated by the need for

making substitute of vacuum tubes for telephones. This exploration leads to the invention of transistor

- Source of engineering design tools and techniques o Science not only covers basic science, engineering science people seldom design tools

and also methods that can be used for advanced use .

- Instrumentation, laboratory techniques, and analytical methods o Instrumentation, laboratory techniques and analytical methods found in basic research

find their way to the industrial process which lead to new instrumentation for technology.

- Development of Human Skill o Researchers that take part in basic research often shift to industries with bringing skills

and method from science.

- Technology assessment o Science provide the ability to assess whether a technology is feasible or not. This

requires a deep knowledge to understand the most basic concept of technology that is being assessed.

o The term science as consciences of technology underlying the fact that greater knowledge is needed to understand technology concept which is more than the

technology itself. - Source of development strategy

On the other hand, Technology contributes to science in the following approaches:

- Source of new challenges o The more radical invention is known, the more likely this invention stimulate science

for basic research.. Most of the times defense and healthcare field is a good example. o It is a bit unclear how technology can trigger science directly according to examples

being given. o

- Instrumentation and measurement techniques o Technological person create instrument that can be utilized by scientist so that scientist

can focus on their work.

Limitation

This article clearly explains on each ways that science and technology affecting each other. However,

Brooks discuss both science and technology in general industry whereas a country may use the term

Science and technology differently.

This article also does not give weight on how science contributes to technology or vice versa so we

can’t distinguished which one is more influential for technological innovation.

Comments on Reading:

Point 4 on page 484 explores economical perspective on expenditure for science and technology. As

for me, this part is interesting. Should companies/ countries focus more on science or technology?

This article explores on how the two components are important for technological innovation. It can

also be viewed as a perspective on whether allocation of resources is effective and efficient if we

choose to put more funding on either science or technology.

Wuchty, Stefan, Benjamin F. Jones, and Brian Uzzi. 2010. “Multi-University Research Teams:

Shifting Impact, Geography and Social Stratification in Science.” Science 322(5905): 1259-1262.

Key Research Question and Main Finding :

This short paper suggests trends in increasing number of collaboration across geographical dispersed

universities that contributes to science which does not being affected by distance, university

stratification and the presence of technology.

Main Discussion

- Number of collaboration of between-school is increasing and produces higher science-impact

compared to other types of collaboration

- Trends in multi-university collaboration take place in almost every disciplines.

- There are no big effect that technology brings in term of collaboration between schools since

collaboration are driven by factors before technology is well known.

- Citation index also being used as a parameter of a succesfull collaborative research.

- Citation impacts show higher number when a research is conducted in between-school

collaboration.

- Research that has within-school collaboration shows lower citation impact compared to

between-school collaboration

- Facts and figures related with collaborative research are displayed across the paper.

Limitation

This paper does not clearly describe type of communication that is needed when researchers

collaborate. It also does not elaborate on the cross-country type of collaboration.

Comments on Reading

What factors contribute to a more collaborative science? This paper explores in such a way that

readers understand that the presence technologies merely affecting science collaboration in a small

way. It gives us insight that in order to increase science-impact, researchers does not need to rely

heavily on technology to collaborate with other researchers.

I find collaboration in research area as interesting topics since there’s limited discussion regarding

what drives scientist to work together. Merging this short article with Benjamin F.Jones article on

the burden of knowledge, I can get an insight on the need for collaborative activities in this area.

This paper will affect how Research institutes / universities allocates communication factor into

their funding and how collaborative science is increasing towards a more complex research

questions.

Jones, Benjamin F. 2009. “The Burden of Knowledge and the ‛Death of the Renaissance Man’: Is Innovation Getting Harder?” Review of Economic Studies 76(1): 283-317.

Key Research Question and Main Finding :

Nowadays, research questions become more difficult to solve that push researchers to collaborate

in order to make technological innovation and get answers.

Main Discussion

- This paper focus on innovators behaviors and facts about innovation. Innovator in this paper

is described as specialist who interact with each other in the implementation of his/her ideas.

- Trends in innovation are :

o “Age at first innovation” is increasing by time where age is define as the sum of age

an innovator complete education and time-gap until the first invention

o Specialization is define as the probability of an innovator to switch between fields of

research.

o Specialization is greater for an area with deep knowledge.

o Specialization is lower for a solo inventor but this paper does not discuss about

innovation that took place within a group of people

o Number of inventors that works collaboratively is increasing by time . This number is

closely related with the increase of knowledge depth (difficult/ complex research

questions)

o Citation Trees ( Diagram that shows how one citation lead to another) , is also become

larger as number of increases in collaborative researchers.

o One surprising finding is a bigger team size (researchers that collaborate each other)

tend to cite less.

- Innovator behaviors that are being observed based on the model are the following :

o Innovators attitude towards deeper knowledge : when they decide to take longer

education with trade-off for salary.

o Innovators attitude towards specialization : when choose to jump between fie lds

Comments on Reading

This paper gives a good insight about what innovation will look like in the future. As today’s

researchers are getting more pressure to produce high-quality impact research, this paper somehow

describe the difficulties that researchers have to face.

At the same time, this paper also focus on why most researchers now collaborate each other and also

their behavior towards challenge in research.

I combine this reading with former Jones’ article on multi-university research teams.