► Clyde Sea Nephrops norvegicus were examined for the presence of plastics. ► Eighty three percent of the animals sampled contained plastic filaments. ► Tangled balls of filaments were found in 62% ...of the animals studied. ► Plastic filaments could be sourced to fishing waste. ► Nephrops in the laboratory ingested filaments in their diet.
The aim of this study was to determine the extent Nephrops consumes plastics in the Clyde Sea and if this intake occurs through their diet. Plastic contamination was found to be high in Nephrops, 83% of the animals sampled contained plastics (predominately filaments) in their stomachs. Tightly tangled balls of plastic strands were found in 62% of the animals studied but were least prevalent in animals which had recently moulted. No significant difference in plastic load was observed between males and females. Raman spectroscopy indicated that some of the microfilaments identified from gut contents could be sourced to fishing waste. Nephrops fed fish seeded with strands of polypropylene rope were found to ingest but not to excrete the strands. The fishery for Norway lobster, Nephrops norvegicus, is the most valuable in Scotland and the high prevalence of plastics in Nephrops may have implications for the health of the stock.
Entrepreneurship is a central path to job creation, economic growth, and prosperity. In the earliest stages of start-up business creation, the matching of entrepreneurial ventures to investors is ...critically important. The entrepreneur's business proposition and previous experience are regarded as the main criteria for investment decisions. Our research, however, documents other critical criteria that investors use to make these decisions: the gender and physical attractiveness of the entrepreneurs themselves. Across a field setting (three entrepreneurial pitch competitions in the United States) and two experiments, we identify a profound and consistent gender gap in entrepreneur persuasiveness. Investors prefer pitches presented by male entrepreneurs compared with pitches made by female entrepreneurs, even when the content of the pitch is the same. This effect is moderated by male physical attractiveness: attractive males were particularly persuasive, whereas physical attractiveness did not matter among female entrepreneurs.
•It presents a dynamic model without assumed direct interactions between patenting and publishing.•The model shows when patents and publications are complements or substitutes.•The model shows that ...complementarity is driven by the similar costs associated with patent and publication disclosures and the need to use non-wage instruments to recruit scientists.•Stronger intellectual property rights can, therefore, lead to more openness in science even in commercial settings.•Races for priority can also lead to more disclosure in commercial science.
This paper provides a theoretical investigation of the tension over knowledge disclosure between firms and their scientific employees. While empirical research suggests that scientists exhibit a “taste for science,” such open disclosures can limit a firm's competitive advantage or ability to profitably commercialize their innovations. To explore how this tension is resolved we focus on the strategic interaction between researchers and firms bargaining over whether (and how) knowledge will be disclosed. We evaluate four disclosure strategies: secrecy, patenting, open science (scientific publication) and patent-paper pairs providing insights into the determinants of the disclosure strategy of a firm. We find that patents and publications can be complementary instruments facilitating the disclosure of knowledge-providing predictions as to when stronger IP protection regimes might drive openness by firms.
STEM PhDs are a critical source of human capital in the economy, contributing to commercial as well as academic science. We examine whether STEM PhD students become new inventors (file their first ...patent) during their doctoral training at the top 25 U.S. universities (by patenting). We find that 4% of PhDs become new inventors. However, among PhDs of faculty who are themselves top (prolific) inventors, this figure rises to 23%. These faculty train 44% of all the new inventor PhDs by copatenting with their advisees. We also explore whether new inventor PhDs are equally distributed by gender. In our university sample, the female share of new inventors is 9% points (pp) lower than the female share of PhDs. Several channels contribute to this: First, female PhDs are less likely to be trained by top inventor advisors (TIs) than male PhDs. Second, they are less likely to be trained by (the larger number of) male top inventors: The estimated gap in the female % of PhDs between female and male TIs is 7 to 9 pp. Third, female PhDs (supervised by top inventors and especially by other faculty) have a lower probability of becoming new inventors relative to their male counterparts. Notably, we find that male and female top inventors have similar rates of transforming their female advisees into new inventors at 4 to 8 pp lower (17 to 26% lower rate) than for male advisees. The gap remains at 4 pp comparing students of the same advisor and controlling for thesis topic.
While science-based entrepreneurial firms are a key feature of the modern economy, our insights into their organization and productivity remain limited. In particular, our understanding of the ...mechanisms through which academic inventors shape entrepreneurial firms established to commercialize their scientific ideas is based upon a traditional perspective that highlights the importance of human capital. Based on a study of biotechnology firms and their academic inventors, this paper examines the extent and mechanisms through which academic scientists contribute not only human capital but also social capital to entrepreneurial firms. The paper makes two contributions to our understanding of the academic–firm interface: First, it establishes that the social capital of academic scientists is critical to firms because it can be transformed into scientific networks that embed the firm in the scientific community through a variety of mechanisms. Second, the paper argues that an academic inventor’s career plays a critical role in shaping his social capital, thus scientific careers mediate the networks and potential for embeddedness that an academic inventor brings to a firm. Specifically, the foundations of an academic’s social capital can be traced to two sources: The first element that the firm may leverage is the academic’s local
laboratory network—a network to current and former students and advisors established by the inventor through his laboratory life. The second form of social capital is a wider,
cosmopolitan network of colleagues and co-authors established through the social patterns of collaboration, collegiality and competition that exemplify scientific careers. These findings suggest that scientific careers are central in shaping an academic’s social capital which can be translated into critical scientific networks in which entrepreneurial firms become embedded.
Although many scholars suggest that IPR has a positive effect on cumulative innovation, a growing "anti-commons" perspective highlights the negative role of IPR over scientific knowledge. At its ...core, this debate is centered on how intellectual property rights over a given piece of knowledge affect the propensity of future researchers to build upon that knowledge in their own scientific research activities. This article frames this issue around the concept of dual knowledge, in which a single discovery may contribute to both scientific research and useful commercial applications, and finds evidence for a modest anti-commons effect. A key implication of dual knowledge is that it may be simultaneously instantiated as a scientific research article and as a patent. The knowledge associated with a patent-paper pair therefore diffuses within two distinct intellectual property environments, one associated with the pre-grant period and another after formal IP rights are granted.
The question of exactly how science is commercialized is an important one. While the social structures of “science” and “technology” are distinctive, recent work suggests that scientific and ...technological ideas in fact co-evolve. This paper addresses the dynamics of such co-evolution: are scientific networks deeply co-mingled with networks through which technology is created and if so how? It does so in a study of an emerging area of biomedicine—tissue engineering. The research is based on a novel methodology that takes advantage of the fact that an idea is often inscribed in both a patent and paper, thus forming a patent–paper pair. Starting with the pair, it is possible to trace the citation network of patents, papers, inventors and authors, combining traditional bibliometric analysis with in-depth interviews to provide new insights. The results show that for this case there exist distinctive scientific and technological networks. Furthermore, while there is evidence of overlap, it is neither co-publishing nor citation as might be predicted from current literature. Rather co-mingling exists through founding, licensing, consulting and advising. This has implications for our understanding of the processes through which spillovers arise, the way in which commercialization and technology transfer should be structured and for recent debates on conflict of interest in biomedicine.
Knowledge-based firms seeking competitive advantage often draw on the public knowledge stream (ideas embedded in public commons institutions) as the foundation for private knowledge (ideas firms ...protect through private intellectual property IP institutions). However, understanding of the converse relationship—the impact of private knowledge strategies on public knowledge production—is limited. We examine this question in human genetics, where policy makers debate expanding IP ownership over the human genome. Our difference-in-differences estimates show that gene patents decrease public genetic knowledge, with broader patent scope, private sector ownership, patent thickets, fragmented patent ownership, and a gene's commercial relevance exacerbating their effect.
When do scientists and other innovators organize into collaborative teams, and why do they do so for some projects and not others? At the core of this important organizational choice is, we argue, a ...trade-off scientists make between the productive efficiency of collaboration and the credit allocation that arises after the completion of collaborative work. In this paper, we explore this trade-off by developing a model to structure our understanding of the factors shaping researcher collaborative choices, in particular the implicit allocation of credit among participants in scientific projects. We then use the annual research activity of 661 faculty scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over a 31-year period to explore the trade-off between collaboration and reward at the individual faculty level and to infer critical parameters in the collaborative organization of scientific work.
This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation
.
Organizational theorists have built a deep understanding of the conditions affecting knowledge sharing. However, for innovation to occur, knowledge must not just be shared, but also reused, ...recombined, and accumulated. Such accumulation is not inherent to the innovation process but can be either supported or limited by the context in which it occurs. We propose a framework arguing that three conditions shape this context: disclosure, access, and rewards. We show how these conditions operate at the institutional, field, community, and organizational levels. Our framework highlights how when innovators encounter barriers to the accumulation of knowledge, their solutions are often organizational ones rather than legal ones. This suggests an expanding terrain for organizational scholars interested in debates often dominated by law and economics.
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