Reviewing patent policy: an exercise in futility?

In 1984, Don Lamberton wrote a two-page disclaimer to a review of the Australian patent system, pointing out that there was nothing economic about the review and that it simply pandered to special interest groups. Some 30 years later, the Productivity Commission has been given a shorter time frame (one year) and a broader remit (all intellectual property). This paper reviews the issues addressed in the Industrial Property Advisory Committee (IPAC) review of 1984. Since it was completed, substantially more empirical evidence has become available, while room for policy improvement has been curtailed by international trade treaties. While the Productivity Commission will take a sound economic approach, the breadth of its remit may prevent full appreciation of the critical issues in patent policy. This paper considers the options remaining to the Commission to recommend improvements in the national interest. Whether these will be taken up depends on the priority given to the interests of small but powerful lobby groups.     

Research and data-sharing policy in Sweden – neoliberal courses,forces and discourses*

ABSTRACT

The discourse of openness has proved to be a very powerful instrument for promoting new research policies and the (neoliberal) reforms of higher education in all so-called ‘advanced economies’. It has triggered positive democracy-, transparency-, and accountability-related associations when used in the context of politics, fair resource distribution when used in the sphere of public service, and free access to information and knowledge when used in the field of science and higher education. At the same time, international research shows that university autonomy is increasingly being attacked, reduced, and marginalized by the same policies. Power instances outside academia impose new criteria, such as ‘accountability,’ ‘performance,’ ‘quality assurance,’ and ‘good practice.’ They also impose ideas about what good research is, which scientific method is to be prioritized, and what good data are. The process of the de-professionalization, polarization, and proletarianization of the academic profession is increasingly affecting academia. However, none of this has much in common with the open-access discourse. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how this discussion applies to Sweden. Courses, forces, and discourses of the national research infrastructure development policy in general, and qualitative data preservation policy in particular, are described and deliberated.     

National technology policy and computer production in Asia‐pacific countries

The relationship of technology policy to economic and industrial development has become a subject of debate between those who argue that market forces should determine how technology is produced and used and those who believe that government has a role in supporting investment in technology use and the development of high‐technology industries. This article looks at the effects of national technology policy in promoting the production of computer hardware and software in Asia‐Pacific countries during the 1980s. It also analyzes the relationship between various environmental factors and computer production and looks at the interaction between environment and policy. It finds three types of environmental factors associated with level of computer production: human resources, in the form of scientists and engineers; the presence of complementary industries, particularly electronics production; and expenditures on research and development. It also finds that hardware production is higher in countries with national computer plans but that software production does not appear to be associated with efforts by the government to promote the computer industry.     

The prevalence of publicly stimulated innovations –A comparison of Finland and Sweden, 1970–2013

While the role played by the state in stimulating innovation in the private sector has been a prevalent interest in innovation research, studies analysing the impacts of public interventions have usually focused on individual policies, programs or projects. Public stimulation is hence often studied from a relatively restricted and temporarily confined perspective, leaving a macro-level and longer-term perspective unrecognized. This article provides further evidence on the matter by examining how many innovations in Finland and Sweden have been publicly stimulated through funding or research collaboration, over a period of more than four decades (1970–2013). Our main source is a new innovation database constructed following the Literature Based Innovation Output (LBIO) method, which gathers the most significant innovations of both countries for the study period, totalling approximately 4100 Swedish and 2600 Finnish innovations. Our results indicate that the public sector has played a very prominent role in stimulating private innovation in both countries, and with an increasing trend. This is especially true for Finland, where 35–55% of the innovations of the period have been stimulated by public funding and 25–65% by collaboration with public research. In Sweden, the share of publicly stimulated innovations has been somewhat lower and erratic, but has increased over time.     

How do policy instruments generate new ones? Analysing policy instruments feedback and interaction in educational research in England, 1986-2014

The study of research funding arrangements and the production of scientific knowledge has been marked by a lack of understanding about how research funding instruments interact and how these instruments shape policy-making and research fields. To fill this research gap, this study is theoretically supported by policy feedback and policy instruments’ interaction studies. It investigates the effects of the UK's research assessment exercise in the creation of the most emblematic national thematic research program for the field of educational research in the country – the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). Based on qualitative analysis of policy documents and semi-structured interviews with policy-makers and boundary-spanners, this paper shows how the research assessment exercise contributed to the creation of the TLRP and how the interaction between the two policy instruments shaped the field of educational research in England. In particular, the results show a) how the institutionalisation of the research assessment led to frame a “quality problem” in educational research that legitimated several policy initiatives, including the creation of the national thematic research programme (interpretative effects) and a shift in resources allocation (resource/incentive effects); and b) how the interaction between the two policy instruments contributed to methodological and epistemic drifts in the field of educational research.     

Employees’ trust and their knowledge sharing and integration: the mediating roles of organizational identification and organization-based self-esteem

We propose that the effect of trust on knowledge sharing (KS) and knowledge integration (KI) is mediated by organizational identification (OI) and organization-based self-esteem (OBSE). We focus on the relationship among different foci of trust and take into consideration that trust is a culturally dependent variable. We draw from a large-scale questionnaire survey with 50 Chinese companies and find support for our hypotheses in general. The study finds that employees’ trust within the organization is a multifaceted construct that includes their trust in the organization, trust in the supervisor and trust in peers. Trust with these different foci positively impact KS and KI. However, such effects are largely indirect and we find support for our expectation that OI and OBSE function as mediators. We conclude that trust in itself is a precondition but not sufficient condition for the actualization of KS and KI.     

Disabled e‐nation: telecommunications,disability, and national policy

This article considers questions of technological change, innovation, and communication from a disability perspective. Using a critical social perspective on disability, we offer an Australian case study to analyse disability in national telecommunications policy. In doing so, we critique the systemic lack of incorporation of disability in national visions, policies, and programmes. Accordingly, we argue for a cohesive, and genuine commitment to incorporating disability considerations in all areas of information and communication technology policy and scholarship.     

Reforming intellectual property rights and the Bt cotton seed industry in China: Who benefits from policy reform?

China has been one of the leaders in agricultural biotechnology research and the adoption of transgenic plants. Despite this, critics argue that China's biotechnology policies could be improved to provide more benefits to farmers. The objective of the paper is to examine if policy changes could improve the welfare of farmers in the cotton industry. The paper first reviews recent changes in laws and policies that affect China's plant biotechnology sector—with a focus on IPR legislation and seed industry reform. Next, using a primary data set collected from 1661 plots from a sample of farmers in northern China in 1999, 2000 and 2001, we econometrically estimate the effect of changes to intellectual property rights (IPR) and seed industry reform on farmer pesticide use and yields. Our results are consistent with a conclusion that improvements to the IPR environment and greater commercialization of the seed industry can increase the benefits that farmers derive from new cotton technology.     

CFTR Gene Mutations and Asthma in Indian Children: A Case–Control Study

Cystic Fibrosis Trans membrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene is an asthma susceptibility gene. In the present study we investigated the possible association of CFTR gene mutations in Indian asthmatic children as compared to controls. The study included 250 asthmatics and 250 age and sex matched controls. Case to control ratio for sample size was 1:1. Genotyping was performed for 24 CFTR gene mutations by ARMS-PCR and PCR–RFLP method. Among 24 CFTR gene mutations, heterozygous allele of R553X mutation was found in 4 (1.6 %) asthmatic cases and 2 (0.8 %) controls. Value of FVC and FEV1/FVC ratio were significantly lower in heterozygous individuals (p value <0.05). No significant difference was observed in the genotype and allele frequency of R553X mutation (OR = 1.339, 95 % CI = 0.755–2.374, p value = 0.685). Furthermore, all wild type homozygous alleles were observed in remaining 23 CFTR gene mutations. Our data concludes that R553X mutation was not significantly associated in Indian asthmatic children.     

Unravelling the drivers of technological innovations in the Czech Republic: Do international technological linkages matter?

This study aims to investigate the main factors driving technological innovation within firms in the manufacturing and service sectors of the Czech Republic. We apply a binary logistic regression model to cross-sectional data from 502 firms, obtained from the World Bank Enterprise Survey. The results of our empirical investigation show that certain elements of the business environment, such as the tax rate, serve as significant obstacles to firms’ product innovations. The results also confirm that international technological linkages—measured by international quality certificates and foreign technology licenses—affect technological innovations. Moreover, we found that internal R&D activities positively impact technological innovation across all sectors; contrarily, we found that process innovation in the manufacturing sector is positively influenced by foreign technology licenses and business association membership. Process innovations in the service sector are positively correlated with external R&D and financing from banking institutions. Finally, business association membership does not positively influence technological innovation in the service sector. Our findings have salient implications for firm managers, policymakers, and scholars aiming to explore and improve innovation outcomes in transitional economies.     

Early-career academic engagement in university–industry collaborative PhDs: Research orientation and project performance

Academic engagement with industry is a well-researched topic. However, research has focused on scholars in traditional university departments, overlooking more hybrid research contexts such as the growing trend of PhD students and their supervisors engaging in collaborative research projects with industry during their training. To address this gap, this study explores the early-career academic engagement of PhD students in university-industry collaborative research projects. It particularly focuses on research orientation and its association with scientific and inventive yield. Drawing on Stokes' (1997) framework, the study investigates the extent to which the research orientation (basic research, applied research, and user-inspired fundamental research) is associated with scientific and inventive yield. The study is based on a review of 631 collaborative PhD projects with industry completed in France in 2018 through a national programme (CIFRE). It finds that the three research orientations are associated with different levels of scientific and inventive yields. While basic research is the most common orientation across the sample, the rarest, user-inspired fundamental research, is associated with the highest scientific and inventive yield. Moreover, the study highlights the critical role of PhD students' taste for science or industry (and the potential change in this taste during the project) in the association between research orientation and projects' yields. Overall, this study sheds light on an understudied area of academic engagement and highlights the significance of considering research orientation and students' taste for science or industry when developing university-industry collaborations. This has implications for PhD supervisors, PhD students, their industrial partners, and policymakers.     

Knowledge flows and bases in emerging economy innovation systems: Brazilian research 2005–2009

This article considers the role of domestic knowledge capabilities for developing countries and emerging economies, and in particular in the build-up of their national systems of innovation. Using bibliometric methods, we describe the geographic sources of knowledge and the users of Brazilian research in 2005–2009, and analyze the roles of domestic and foreign knowledge bases in it. Our results suggest that increasing reliance on domestic sources of knowledge is a feature of Brazil's improved science and technology capabilities. The ascendancy of Brazil's research informs us about the unfolding re-organization of global research, too, underlining nascent South-South knowledge flows, the prevailing relevance of EU research, and the relative decline of US research for Brazilian knowledge creation.     

Against misleading technocratic precision in research evaluation and wider policy – A response to Franzoni and Stephan (2023), ‘uncertainty and risk-taking in science’

Franzoni and Stephan (2023) recommend a probabilistic ‘subjective expected utility’ technique for addressing challenges of uncertainty in research evaluation. Whilst acknowledging strengths in F&S's analysis, this Response highlights a series of important practical, theoretical and methodological deficiencies. The stakes are raised, in that these are widely shared in a growing body of practice across research policy and beyond. This practice seeks to reduce and aggregate real-world complex, ambiguous, qualitative, multidimensional and contested challenges through ostensibly precise calculation. Taking associated problems in turn, this Response shows how F&S: make scientifically dubious claims; understate the depths of uncertainty; overstate the sufficiency of quantification; neglect foundational limits to calculation; and ignore crucial interpretive dimensions of policy making. Highlighting roles for greater methodological diversity, this Response points at the end to alternative methods that collectively allow more robustly plural approaches to contrasting aspects of incertitude. In the process, the steering of directions for research can become more rigorous and accountable and less vulnerable to manipulation and inadvertent bias. With globally growing ‘post-truth’ authoritarian populism arguably partly provoked by the kind of technocracy criticised here, research evaluation may in a small way help re-invigorate democracy by ‘opening up’ in this particular area, the hiding of politics behind expertise.     

Individualism–collectivism and tenure intent among knowledge workers in India and Bulgaria: Moderating effects of equity perceptions and task interdependence

In the present study, using a sample of 367 employees (219 from India and 148 from Bulgaria), we examined whether task interdependence and equity perceptions moderated the relationship between individualism–collectivism orientation and tenure intent. Results indicated that employees with a higher level of collectivism orientation tended to report greater intent to stay with the organization. Further, employees with a higher level of individualism orientation reported greater intent to stay with the organization when task interdependence was lower and equity perceptions were higher. Employees with a higher level of collectivism reported greater intent to stay with the organization when equity perceptions were higher regardless of whether tasks were interdependent or not. Finally, employees, regardless of their individualism or collectivism orientation, reported the lowest tenure intent when tasks were highly interdependent and equity perceptions were low. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Measuring the temporal dynamics of policy mixes – An empirical analysis of renewable energy policy mixes’ balance and design features in nine countries

Complex societal or environmental problems require fast and substantial socio-technical transitions. For instance, in the case of climate change, these transitions need to take place in the energy, transport and several industry sectors. To induce and accelerate such transitions, numerous policy interventions are required, which interact with each other in policy mixes. While several conceptual studies on policy mixes have been published recently, there is very little empirical research apart from single case or small-n studies. It has been prominently argued that the debate about policy mixes has reached an impasse partly due to this lack of empirical work. This paper addresses this gap by providing a first analysis of the temporal dynamics of complex policy mixes. To do so, we develop a conceptualization and measurement of policy mix balance across instrument types as well as policy mix design features (in the form of intensity as a general and technology specificity as a technology-focused design feature). This allows us to answer the question how temporal dynamics of policy mixes differ between countries regarding their balance and design features. Our measurement approach is developed bottom-up, i.e., policies are assessed individually and then aggregated systematically at the policy mix level. This enables overcoming the ‘dependent variable problem in the study of policy change’, i.e., the problem of measuring policy output. More specifically, we develop a comparative dataset of 522 renewable energy policies in nine OECD countries. Our analysis shows that countries’ policy mix dynamics vary strongly regarding some variables (e.g., technology specificity) but less regarding others (e.g., balance). As a validity check, we also test the effects of these mix dynamics on policy outcome in the form of renewable energy technology diffusion. We reflect our findings in light of the theoretical debates around policy mixes and policy design and discuss how our results provoke an agenda for the new generation of research on policy mixes. We specifically discuss avenues for future research with a particular focus on the ‘politics of policy mixes’.     

Interaction between prey and mutually interfering predator in prey reserve habitat: Pattern formation and the Turing–Hopf bifurcation

In this paper, we propose a diffusive prey-predator system with mutually interfering predator (Crowley–Martin functional response) and prey reserve. In particular, we develop and analyze both spatially homogeneous model based on ordinary differential equations and reaction-diffusion model. We mainly investigate the global existence and boundedness of positive solution, stability properties of homogeneous steady state, non-existence of non-constant positive steady state, conditions for Turing instability and Hopf bifurcation of the diffusive system analytically. Conventional stability properties of the non-spatial counterpart of the system are also studied. The analysis ensures that the prey reserve leaves stabilizing effect on the stability of temporal system. The prey reserve and diffusive parameters leave parallel impact on the stability of the spatio-temporal system. Furthermore, we illustrate the spatial patterns via numerical simulations, which show that the model dynamics exhibits diffusion controlled pattern formation by different interesting patterns.     

Searching for motives: Suicides of doctors and dentists in the Third Reich and the postwar period, 1933–1949

The criminal practices of National Socialism not only led to millions of murders, but also to increased suicide rates. The present study examines a specific aspect of this phenomenon: the suicides and corresponding motives of 275 German doctors and dentists in the period from 1933 to 1949. The analysis is based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. Most suicides were due to National Socialist repression, with peaks in 1938 and 1942. One fifth of the cases were among National Socialist perpetrators, with a peak of those suicides occurring in 1945. The motives for suicide ranged from despair to a lack of career prospects to a final act of self-determination and political opposition; many of the doctors experienced or expected a social downfall before attempting suicide.     

Innovation intermediaries and collaboration: Knowledge–based practices and internal value creation

This paper analyses how knowledge-based practices adopted by innovation intermediaries enable them to generate value for themselves when collaborating with their clients. While the literature focuses on value creation for their client organisations, little is known about how innovation intermediaries create internal value even though this is essential for ensuring their long-term survival and sustaining their key facilitating role in the innovation system. This understudied issue is explored using empirical evidence from a sub-set of innovation intermediaries, Research and Technology Organisations (RTOs). The results indicate that by capitalising on existing knowledge vested in employees and collaborators as well as understanding and shaping the knowledge base of the innovation ecosystem, innovation intermediaries generate internal value from their involvement in collaborative innovation, which range from different financial to non-financial types of value. Implications for intermediaries, their collaborators and for policymakers are then discussed.     

Gay-Lussac (1778–1850): A view of chemistry,industry and society in post-revolutionary France

This year marks the bicentenary of the births of two distinguished chemists, Joseph Gay-Lussac and Humphry Davy. This study of the life of Gay-Lussac shows how his work was related to that of Davy as well as to that of his French contemporaries. His keen interest in the application of chemistry earned him some criticism in his lifetime, but in retrospect can be seen to have contributed to his professional stature.     

The importance of co‐ordination in national technology policy: Evidence from the Galileo project1

We assess the benefits from transatlantic collaboration in technology policy for publicly‐funded R&D space projects such as Galileo, a proposed European radio‐navigation space project. An industrial organisation methodology is employed to model negative security spillovers of ‘unilateral’ space projects such as Galileo, or space‐based anti‐ballistic missile defence, on the public sector of the other region (the US vs. the European Union). The findings imply that transatlantic co‐ordination in technology policy is required to allow the respective space industries (in the US and the European Union) to exploit the benefits of cross‐border strategic research partnerships (SRPs). This coordination not only reduces the costs of the respective programmes, but also addresses security concerns.