Research and Development
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- 16 Mar 2023
- Research & Ideas
Why Business Travel Still Matters in a Zoom World
Meeting in person can make all the difference for colleagues from different time zones or cultural backgrounds. A study by Prithwiraj Choudhury traces flight patterns among 5,000 airports around the world to show how business travel propels innovation.
- 22 Feb 2021
- Working Paper Summaries
Private and Social Returns to R&D: Drug Development and Demographics
Research and development (R&D) by pharmaceutical firms focuses disproportionately on medical conditions afflicting the elderly. The proportion of R&D spending targeting older age groups is increasing over time. Even though these investments in R&D prolong life expectancy and improve quality of life, they have little effect on measured productivity and output growth.
- 30 Nov 2020
- Working Paper Summaries
Short-Termism, Shareholder Payouts, and Investment in the EU
Shareholder-driven “short-termism,” as evidenced by increasing payouts to shareholders, is said to impede long-term investment in EU public firms. But a deep dive into the data reveals a different story.
- 24 Aug 2020
- Working Paper Summaries
When Do Experts Listen to Other Experts? The Role of Negative Information in Expert Evaluations for Novel Projects
Evaluators of early-stage scientific proposals tend to systematically focus on the weaknesses of proposed work rather than its strengths, according to evidence from two field experiments.
- 10 Aug 2020
- Research & Ideas
COVID's Surprising Toll on Careers of Women Scientists
Women scientists and those with young children are paying a steep career price in the pandemic, according to new research by Karim Lakhani, Kyle Myers, and colleagues. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 02 Aug 2020
- What Do You Think?
Is the 'Experimentation Organization' Becoming the Competitive Gold Standard?
SUMMING UP: Digital experimentation is gaining momentum as an everyday habit in many organizations, especially those in high tech, say James Heskett's readers. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 08 Jul 2020
- Working Paper Summaries
Inventing the Endless Frontier: The Effects of the World War II Research Effort on Post-War Innovation
Investments made in World War II by the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development powered decades of subsequent innovation and the take-off of regional technology hubs around the country.
- 23 Mar 2020
- Working Paper Summaries
The Effects of Hierarchy on Learning and Performance in Business Experimentation
Do senior managers help or hurt business experiments? Analyzing a dataset of more than 6,300 experiments on the A/B/n testing platform Optimizely, this study suggests that involving senior executives in experimentation teams can have surprising consequences.
- 04 Dec 2019
- Book
Creating the Experimentation Organization
New tools allow companies to innovate on an unprecedented scale, in every aspect of business. But the organization must also change. Stefan Thomke previews his forthcoming book, Experimentation Works. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 12 Nov 2019
- Research & Ideas
Corporate Innovation Increasingly Benefits from Government Research
Nearly a third of US patents rely directly on government-funded research, says Dennis Yao. Is government too involved in supporting private sector innovation—or not enough? Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 28 Feb 2019
- Cold Call Podcast
Pursuing Precision Medicine at Intermountain Healthcare
What happens when Intermountain Healthcare invests resources in an innovative precision medicine unit to provide life-extending, genetically targeted therapies to late-stage cancer patients? Professors Richard Hamermesh and Kathy Giusti discuss the case and its connections to their work with the Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 19 Dec 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Find and Replace: R&D Investment Following the Erosion of Existing Products
This study sheds light on how product outcomes shape the direction of innovation and markets for technology. In the drug development industry in particular, negative product shocks appear to spur investment changes both within the directly affected firm and in competing firms in the same R&D markets.
- 04 Oct 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Corruption, Government Subsidies, and Innovation: Evidence from China
Governments subsidize a growing number of innovation efforts, many of which may face the challenge of corruption. Using Chinese data, this study finds corruption-related distortions in government R&D subsidies, which diminished after the 2012 anti-corruption campaign and rotation of provincial officials. It provide insights for designing effective R&D subsidy programs.
- 09 Feb 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Developing Novel Drugs
This paper contributes to our understanding of how financing constraints affect the direction of innovation in drug development. The authors develop a new measure of drug novelty based on molecular characteristics, and explore the tradeoffs involved in decisions to develop more novel therapies. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 15 Jan 2018
- Research & Ideas
A Better Business Model for Fighting Cancer
The Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator aims to speed up the development and delivery of cancer therapies by improving the business processes that surround them. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 26 Jul 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
The Impact of the Entry of Biosimilars: Evidence from Europe
Biosimilars are large-molecule drugs that, while not an exact copy of already-approved large-molecule drugs, have been shown to be therapeutically equivalent. Much like generic drugs, which become available when a small-molecule drug goes off patent, biosimilars are lower in cost than their reference products and present an opportunity for savings when large-molecule drugs’ patents expire. Biosimilars have been available in the United States only since 2015 but have been regulated, approved, and sold in Europe for over a decade. This paper examines the European experience to help inform policy design and institutional choices for the United States. Topics covered include the entry of distributors and unique products; predictors of average product prices following biosimilar competition; and penetration of biosimilars as a share of total sales.
- 10 Aug 2015
- Research & Ideas
New Medical Devices Get To Patients Too Slowly
The FDA has streamlined drug testing to ensure new therapies come to market quickly. But when it comes to life-giving medical devices, approvals seem unnecessarily slow, according to research by Ariel Dora Stern. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 01 Dec 2014
- Working Paper Summaries
Financing Innovation
There is growing consensus that well-functioning financial markets play a central role in driving economic growth through their ability to spur technological innovation. In this paper for the Annual Review of Financial Economics, the authors ask how financial markets might actively shape the nature of R&D that is undertaken. They also examine how this may impact technological innovation and growth through the shaping of the ideas that are developed across firms. Drawing on a new but growing literature on the role that capital markets and financial intermediaries play in impacting firm-level innovation, the authors first elaborate on theoretical contributions regarding why financing R&D projects might be distinct from financing other types of projects and the channels through which financial intermediaries and capital markets can impact innovation. They then discuss empirical studies on financing innovation in mature firms, in particular the literature on how ownership and capital structure impact the amount and nature of innovation undertaken by firms. The paper also looks at innovation in startups and the growing literature on the effect that multi-stage financing has on innovation in young firms. Three main themes emerge: 1) A growing body of work documents a role for debt financing related to innovation. 2) A very active area of research has looked at "learning" across multi-stage financing. 3) There is strong interaction between financing choices for innovation and changing external conditions. Key concepts include: Financing constraints can be extensive in the context of firms engaged in R&D and innovation-with the ability to shape both the rate and the trajectory of innovation. Capital structure plays a central role in the outcome of innovations. Bank finance is an important source of finance, particularly for larger firms with tangible and intangible assets to pledge as collateral. Public markets may provide deep pockets but pose a set of agency costs that might be particularly harmful for firms engaged in exploration and novel innovations. There is a growing interest among academics and practitioners in the multi-stage financing of innovation, both in established firms and startups, and understanding the optimal contracts and policies that might stimulate innovation. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 31 Jul 2014
- Research & Ideas
A Scholarly Crowd Explores Crowdsourcing
At the Open and User Innovation Workshop, several hundred researchers discussed their work on innovation contests, user-led product improvements, and the biases of crowds. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
The FDA’s Speedy Drug Approvals Are Safe: A Win-Win for Patients and Pharma Innovation
Expediting so-called breakthrough therapies has saved millions of dollars in research time without compromising drug safety or efficacy, says research by Ariel Stern, Amitabh Chandra, and colleagues. Could policymakers harness the approach to bring life-saving treatments to the market faster?