Studying the contributions of U.S. universities to the innovation process and National Income is important to understanding how our current economic status has been achieved and to how our international competitiveness may be maintained or increased. This project models a key component of the innovation system, particularly creation and deployment of knowledge and the flows of financial resources. The objectives of this work are to produce estimates of the contributions of various combinations of university resources, especially those of STEM units, to outcomes that represent intermediate steps in the innovation process and that contribute to NI and thus to U.S. competitiveness.
The key insight of the project is that universities produce multiple outputs--for example supplies of highly skilled labor and new knowledge. The importance of this labor and technological development to the national economy has been well established in both classical and evolutionary economic theory. In addition, universities serve as support institutions for firms and industries. Universities contribute to intermediate outcomes that stimulate innovation processes and fuel the national economy.
The primary emphasis is to use data to develop new models explaining the relationships among resource deployment in U. S. universities and intermediate (to National Income growth) university outcomes, particularly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). These are outcomes that are important to U.S. economic growth and ultimately to international competitiveness and hence the models can be used to inform science and technology investment decisions.
The project builds a relational meta data base that examines the relationships among resource deployment in U.S. universities and intermediate university outcomes related to innovation and economic growth. The data for the project are derived from a variety of sources at the institutional, departmental, and individual levels. Intermediate and final outcomes include wages paid, the production of graduates, patents, licenses, start-up and spin-off companies, consultancies, joint industry-university grants and contracts, job-training programs for firms? employees, and importantly, research papers. ?Inputs? related to these outcomes include various university resources: e.g., the human resources of university faculty, staff, and student workers; the time allocations of these individuals across teaching, research and service; and the allocation of the university?s own financial resources.
BROADER IMPACTS: The benefits include advancing understanding of the relationships among resource deployment in U. S. universities and intermediate university outcomes in STEM fields. These are outcomes that are important to U.S. economic growth and ultimately to international competitiveness. Thus, the models can be used to inform science and technology investment decisions.
Intellectual merit. The intellectual merit of our project is demonstrated by our 5 published papers published in Journal of Higher Education, Minerva, Research Policy and Economics of Education. These are in the PIs main field (higher education) but also in other disciplines (economics) and interdisciplinary journals (Minerva, Research Policy). Broader impacts. 1) Recently the NSF published a report, Diminishing funding and rising expectations: Trends and challenges for public universities, that expressed concern about the growing differences between public and private research universities, which are creating gaps that challenge public universities, so much so that policy makers are concerned with public research universities’ ability to sustain their missions (National Science Board 2012a). Among policy makers concerns are whether public research universities’ contribution to research likely to lead to innovation may be diminishing (National Science Board 2012b). Our series of papers on "private advantage" explores this problem in depth, looking not only at how differences in private and public higher education play out in S&E, but also examining how S&E revenues and deployment interact with other broad fields of study. This approach allows us to identify problems in the resource environment for S&E, specifically, and higher education, generally, that policy could address. Some examples are provided below. For the literature, theory, research design and methods, and a nuanced discussion of results that inform this presentation of policy implications, please consult the articles mentioned. 2) We also discovered that trustees at private research universities are a channel between industries and universities. We studied the relationship between the university trustees who sat on boards of science corporations and the research efforts of the universities they represented. Only private universities trustees were closely connected to a national and transnational network of science corporations. We used OLS models to explore the relationship between concentration of a university’s trustees’ in corporate science fields similar to their university’s research fields to see if increases in numbers of trustees in shared research fields predicted increases in R & D dollars. In 2005 universities’ corporate science fields, all else equal, were stronger predictors as measured by R&D dollars than any other variables commonly used to predict university success with regard to R&D. Further analyses revealed that Analyses revealed that no private university trustee was more than one step away from another. Public universities were not connected to this network. Analyses of patent classes revealed the points where private AAU trustees’ universities and corporations shared similar research interests. We found that the percentage of total ties to patenting corporations within a university’s research profile grew from 5.61% in 1997, to 19.01% in 2001, and 26.06% in 2005. While 26.6% does not indicate systemic patterning of interlocks, it nonetheless suggests the emergence of a trend toward patent profile similarity between universities and their trustees’ corporations. The overlaps between trustees’ science corporations and universities research fields, as evidenced by same class patenting, constituted a shared entrepreneurial science field in the relatively narrow band where advanced science has the potential to be incorporated in mass-market products. These findings raise several policy issues. (a) If trustees are channels that bring universities together with business and industry around patent classes how can these shared endeavors be stimulated to create technology development likely to contribute to economic innovation? The most obvious policy effort at the federal level would be to target research fields shared by corporations and universities. However, great care would have to be taken in that some fields and universities would be preferred over others, and what benefits private universities, on which this study is based, may not benefit or publics. And, of course, there is always the "picking winners and losers" issue. (b) When university trustees’ science corporations share research fields with universities, the potential for technology development and economic innovation may grow, but so does the possibility for institutional conflict of interest. For example, trustees and university senior management may prefer projects that share patents and bring financial gain to trustees’ corporations and increase research revenues for universities through licensing. Although conflict of interest policies exist at the federal, state and national level, they frequently do not address trustees in other than a minimal fashion. Policies will have to crafted to encourage shared research interest likely to lead to commercialization, while at the same time managing institutional conflict of interest in ways that protect research integrity and the public good.
