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