Advancing evidence based science and innovation policy.
The Science of Science & Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program was established at NSF in 2005 in response to a call from Dr. John Marburger III for a "specialist scholarly community" to study the science of science policy.1 The program has three major goals: advancing evidence-based science & innovation policy decision making; developing and building a scientific community to study science & innovation policy; and developing new and improved datasets. A recent Science article highlights some of the issues addressed by SciSIP researchers. 2
Advancing evidence-based science and innovation policy
Forty-three awards have been made in two rounds of funding: Information about those awards is available at www.aaas.org/spp/SciSIP/ . A third round of awards is being processed and an announcement will be made when all the awards are finalized. The awardees include economists, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists, as well as domain scientists. Some of these awards are already showing results, with papers, presentations, software, and data development.
One area of focus of SciSIP is to advance understanding of the role of firms in innovation. One SciSIP project, co-funded with the Kauffman Foundation, is collecting data from 20,000 firms about the division of the steps in the innovation process - idea generation, idea development, and commercialization - across multiple organizations. 3 Another project examines the changing geography of innovation to areas like China, India, and Eastern Europe. The growth of invention in emerging economies has relied heavily on research inputs from Western firms; the shift to such economies may both improve the efficiency of the R&D process and allow firms to explore more technological opportunities with a given level of expenditure. International co-invention might well generate net positive effects for US economic growth and end up reinforcing American technological leadership rather than undermining it. 4 This research is balanced by that of another study which seeks to understand the impact of manufacturing offshore on 1) the innovative activities of the firms that moved manufacturing offshore, and 2) the continued progress of the advanced technologies within the same or other institutions in the US. The study develops a set of metrics that can be used immediately by policy makers to assess ecosystem resiliency, and will enable academics to build on these metrics in future work characterizing industry ecosystems. 5
Yet another study examines the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries to understand how different types of individual innovative activities come to be linked sequentially in a chain of events that may ultimately produce new commercial products or processes. The project adds to our understanding of the organizational and institutional determinants of the overall productivity of linked sequences of innovative events through time and space. 6 Another project examines the impact of strategic sharing of knowledge developed by firms to address the negative effects associated with overlapping intellectual property rights, or "patent thickets," on the commercialization of new innovations. The particular focus is the biomedical research industry, drawing on the researchers' deep knowledge of the information technology and communications industries. 7
Another focus is to understand the human beings who innovate, create, and engage in the science and innovation enterprise. The traditional model is one of "superstar "scientists:
The value of such scientists is empirically estimated by examining the importance of spillovers for scientific
Funded projects cover a wide spectrum of topics, such as the role of
progress in the biomedical area. 8 Increasingly, however, science seems to be driven by cross-disciplinary research teams, as shown by a set of studies that examines how scientific breakthroughs emerge through collaborative processes that integrate knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. 9 Another project analyzes the interactions between scientists and innovators in a different setting - informal virtual social networks - to examine whether these new networks can serve as incubators for sharing ideas that are precursors to innovation. 10 An additional study examines how to develop new taxonomies for the ways in which scientific units organize themselves by utilizing patterns of collaboration, and the specific body of knowledge that these collaborations entail, to identify the frontiers of the focal units - as well as other units that qualify as relevant benchmarks. 11
Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds (Vienna Science and Technology Fund)
Vienna is well on its way to becoming a very dynamic research location, with about half of all Austrian research being performed here. One internationally visible example is the clustering of leading life sciences research institutions in the "Dr. Bohrgasse," the Vienna Biocenter . Mathematics is another field in which researchers are gaining international visibility. The Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF ), a private nonprofit funding organization established to promote high quality science and research in Vienna, tries to enhance this reputation by promoting research in promising thematic priority areas such as the Life Sciences, Applied Mathematics, Information and Communication Technology, and Science for Creative Industries. A more recent focus of WWTF's funding activities is to explicitly promote promising young researchers. While a WWTF project must have a Viennese home institution, up to 20 percent of the funding may be spent outside of Vienna, thus promoting and supporting collaborations between Viennese scientists and international researchers.
Norman R. Augustine is one of the "Fifty Great Americans" living, according to the Library of Congress and Who's Who in America . A quick Google search of his name results in more than half a million matches for the retired chairman and former CEO of the Lockheed Martin Corporation .
In addition to his successful career in corporate America, Augustine has served in key government positions under two US presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He was the assistant secretary for research and development of the Army from 1973 to 1975, and then undersecretary of the Army from 1975 to 1977.
Today, although he considers himself "retired," Augustine serves on countless governmental advisory boards. He also served for 16 years on the President¹s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under both presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In 1990, he led the Advisory Committee on the Future of the US Space Program, and in 2005 he was assigned chairman of the National Academies commission that produced the landmark report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future ."
Just recently, in May 2009, he was again called by the White House to chair another high-level panel. He is currently leading the committee that is reviewing, and will determine the future of, the US Human Space Flight Plans. The panel¹s final report and its recommendations are expected at the end of August this year.
Augustine, who attended Princeton University where he graduated with a bachelor of science in aeronautical engineering, magna cum laude, and a master of science in engineering, was interviewed by bridges regarding his views on and recommendations for the future of science and engineering in the United States.
bridges: You have underlined repeatedly how important it is to sow the seeds of interest in science and engineering early in childhood. Can you tell me a little bit about your own upbringing? Who planted the science seed in you?
Augustine: I actually consider myself a bad example of the points that I am trying to make with regard to early science and engineering education. I grew up in Colorado, always loved the mountains, and wanted to become a forest ranger. It was not until high school that I discovered my interest for science and mathematics. I was reasonably good at science but always very good in mathematics, kind of a natural.
It was my grandfather who was really into science. Although he had only a fourth grade education, he made models of how the planetary system works, and so on. I consider him one of those brilliant men who never received the right education to make best use of their talents. If there was anyone from whom I "inherited" my interest for science, I guess that would be him.
When I got to college, engineering seemed to be a reasonable thing to study. However, it wasn't always a clear path to me. Even at college age I was still considering forestry as an option. Eventually, I followed some study advisors who recommended aerospace engineering to me.
Austrian Scientist of Year 2008, Dr. Fatima Ferreira, director of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Allergy Diagnosis and Therapy at the University of Salzburg in Austria, gave an evening lecture at the Embassy of Austria in Washington, DC, on June 29, at which she discussed a topic that affects 25 percent of people in Europe, 20 percent of people in the US, and millions around the world - allergies. Ferreira's current research focuses on the development of birch, ragweed, mugwort, Japanese cedar, and cypress pollen allergy vaccines. With the lab's industrial partnership with the Austrian biotechnology company, Biomay, Ferreira and her colleagues were involved in the first worldwide development of recombinant birch pollen allergen Bet v 1 - an artificial allergen that provides a more specialized approach to curing allergies.
A jury from the Austrian Club of Education and Science Journalists elected Ferreira as Austrian Scientist of the Year 2008 and, as in years past, the Office of Science & Technology (OST) at the Embassy of Austria invited the Austrian Scientist of the Year to Washington to present her work - using the US capital as a platform to communicate the work to the American public. Hosted by the OST, the event was held in cooperation with the Embassy of Brazil in Washington, DC, and was also part of the European Science Series in collaboration with Euraxess .
Dreams of greater independence and mobility have always inspired people to break the mold, leading to innovations to satisfy these demands. This has certainly been the case with Roman Scharf and Daniel Mattes, two successful Austrian entrepreneurs and founders of JAJAH Corporation1 ,one of the most successful IT start-up companies of recent years, now headquartered in Mountain View in the heart of California’s famous Silicon Valley. Recently named a TiE50 award winner in May 2009, for being one of the most promising start-ups and “a leader in innovation, ingenuity, and management excellence,” JAJAH has also won the Alexander Graham Bell Award for Best Communication Solution, as well the Always On, and the Global Red Herring Award.
What are we talking about?
A simplified illustration of how JAJAH works
JAJAH is a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service that gives a user the potential to make long distance calls at much lower rates compared to standard phone lines, using the VoIP technology which delivers voice communications over IP networks such as the Internet. From this point of view it is similar to Skype, a pioneer within the VoIP sector. But what differentiates JAJAH from Skype, and doubtless is one of the main secrets of its success, is the fact that neither the caller nor the receiver needs anything but a phone – no headset, no software, no computer, and no broadband connection.
The idea behind JAJAH is both simple and brilliant: Once a call is initiated via JAJAH web, JAJAH calls back the caller as well as the intended receiver. The call is then routed through the calling party’s phone network (landline or mobile), to JAJAH’s servers, and then back out through the call receiver’s phone. JAJAH even allows a person to get a local number for international contacts, which permits the calling party to save the numbers in an address book and dial the number directly from his/her phone. Compared to Skype, mobility and flexibility are defined in a totally new way. JAJAH can be used from anywhere in the world, as long as there is a connection with an operator.
At the time of Johann W. von Goethe, network thinking was not relevant in science; an individual fighting spirit characterized the everyday life of a scientist. Cooperation in engineering science has become a necessity today in order to provide answers to interdisciplinary issues. Against this background, a four-year research project of the American National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been started with the participation of TU Graz, with the aim of understanding the growth of abdominal aortic aneurysms.
Thomas Young (1773-1829) is called as "The Last Man Who Knew Everything"1 . He was a polymath who proved Newton wrong, explained how we see, deciphered the Rosetta Stone together with Champollion, and recognized the importance of combining mathematical physics with biological experiments to better understand physiological and pathological processes (see Figure 1). He was also the person who developed Young's modulus, a material parameter in materials science named after him and known by every student of engineering science. Quite literally, Young's research cooperation was with himself.
Figure 1: Thomas Young (1773–1829) was the “last polymath” who recognized the importance of biological experiments in mathematical physics. He was a scientific loner who published the legendary “Croonian Lecture. On the functions of the heart and arteries” [2] in the Philosophical Transactions, the oldest scientific journal printed in the English-speaking world.
About 200 years later, we are living in a period of networking and globalization, in which a single person may achieve very little by himself. Thomas Young probably would not have been comfortable with our present degree of specialization. Today's science seeks an interdisciplinary approach precisely because of this specialization - an interdisciplinary approach in which the cooperation of experts promotes reciprocal advances. And this particularly holds true for engineering sciences. Here cooperation includes cooperation between research units of different universities, national and international, and within an in-house interdisciplinary research group. Robert S. Langer, pioneer of tissue engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and laureate of the 2002 Charles Stark Draper Prize (considered the Nobel Prize of engineering science), is probably the best example of the success of a cooperative endeavor in a technical discipline. Langer set up his own research institute, where engineers work together very successfully with medical doctors, mathematicians, geneticists, materials scientists, cell biologists, chemists, and physicists 3 .
International cooperation in research and development enhances the work at every university of technology that is willing to face the global challenges of today's complex world. This cooperation is greatly facilitated by electronic communication. Graz University of Technology successfully cooperates in research and teaching with several universities, extramural research facilities, and companies. TU Graz has numerous academic cooperation agreements and strategic partnerships and an active presence on nearly all continents4 .
3. The Division of Innovative Labor: Features, Determinants and Impacts on Innovative Performance. Researchers: Ashish Arora (Carnegie Mellon), Wes Cohen (Duke), and John Walsh (Georgia Tech). NSF award 0830349
4. The Rise of International Coinvention: A New Phase in The Globalization Of R&D? Researcher: Lee Branstetter, (Carnegie Mellon University). NSF award 0830233
5. Quantifying the Resilience of The US Innovation Ecosystem. Researcher: Erica Fuchs (Carnegie Mellon). NSF award 0930354
6. Modeling Innovation Chains Using Case-Based Econometrics. Researcher: Kenneth Flamm (University Of Texas, Austin). NSF award 0830389
7. Patent Pools and Biomedical Innovation. Researchers: Josh Lerner (Nber) and Jean Tirole (Fondation Jean-Jacques Laffont-TSE). NSF award 0830288
8. Estimating the Effect of Exposure to Superstar Scientists: Evidence from Academia and the Biopharmaceutical Sector. Researchers: Joshua Graff Zivin (NBER and Columbia University) and Pierre Azoulay (MIT). NSF award 0738142
