Thomas Schaper

Linking scientific articles in PubMed and corporate biomedical U.S. patents, we study the role of inventors who are frontier scientists, identified as authors of recent articles in top-general biomedical journals. We find that inventions by these “frontier authors” receive more patent citations, are more likely to become technology hits, and have broad technology impact. They are also more likely to be internally further developed by the firm, hold greater monetary value, and feature broader claims—not only compared to inventions by non-author inventors but also to those by non-frontier authors, including “star” authors. This impact premium is especially strong in scaled-up young biopharmaceutical firms and for frontier authors internally employed at the patenting firm. To better understand the mechanism behind the impact premium of frontier author patents, we analyze their boundary spanning role. We find that frontier author patents are more likely to use and to be first users of frontier science. However, while frontier author patents achieve peak impact when referencing frontier science, this advantage is comparable to other patents that reference frontier science. And as frontier author patents also enjoy an impact premium on patents referencing other than frontier science, our results, thus, suggest that closeness to frontier science is only part of the story of the superior impact of inventions by frontier scientists.

Increasing competition in science and higher education has sparked contentious debate and scholarly attention in recent years. Despite their significant merits, prevailing accounts of competition fall short of capturing the competitive dynamics in science and higher education: Most of the time, actors in this sector are involved in not just one but several competitions. Universities as organizations, researchers as individual actors, and also state actors are simultaneously embedded in different, nested, and interdependent competitions, which we refer to as multiple competition. Individual and collective actors engage in heterogeneous—albeit interrelated—forms of competition for scarce symbolic and material goods like attention, reputation, ranking positions, research grants, high-quality publications, personnel, and employment. Furthermore, the multiplicity of competitions that individual academics, universities, and state agencies face might reinforce each other. Using theoretical resources from sociology and economics, we propose a new conceptual framework for analyzing constellations of multiple competition in science and higher education. We demonstrate the added value of this conceptualization for empirical studies by drawing on examples from different academic systems.

Efficient access to existing knowledge is essential to technical advance, yet little is known about how access-enhancing institutions shape intertemporal knowledge spillovers. In this paper, I investigate the cumulative technological impact of the CNIDR AIDS Database, the first, disease-targeted, online repository of electronic patent documents, launched in 1994. Tracing references from subsequent patents, I find that the marginal impact of the repository was largest (+30%) among patents for which the established disease-link was previously non-obvious to detect through standard bibliographic search, in line with predictions of stronger reduction of internal search costs. Further findings suggest that increased visibility and attention to more "hidden" prior art particularly benefited private sector HIV researchers, and was reflected in enhanced diffusion of technological knowledge across scientific community and geographic boundaries.

Competitive public research funding provides an important policy instrument to foster the link between scientific progress and industrial inventions. The effective design of such funding schemes, however, remains debated. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of geographically localized forum grants—Clusters of Excellence—awarded for additive manufacturing research under Germany’s Excellence Initiative from 2006–2012. Using synthetic difference-in-differences estimation, we find that Clusters increased local scientific output in funding-related domains especially in the right-tail of the scientific impact distribution—as measured by article citations—compared to non-funded applicant groups in similar locations. While patenting by nearby firms remained unaffected at the extensive margin, we find evidence for significant knowledge spillovers to local industry. These manifested in a rise of the number of high-impact corporate patents, confined to related technical areas, and Clusters receiving a significantly larger number of prior art citations from industry patents worldwide, compared to the control group and confined to top-publications. Our findings support the effectiveness of forum-based funding programs for top science and provide dual implications for research and industrial policy.

We investigate the impact of broadband internet diffusion on patenting activity and external knowledge sourcing. Based on exogenous variation in ADSL activation in U.K. between 2000-2007, we find that broadband access increased the number of yearly filed patents by 10-55%, depending on the IV approach. This increase was driven by easier access to geographically distant prior art as evidenced by an increase in the share of references to patents from abroad, and a 2-3 year decline in the average age of these foreign citations. Reassuringly, we do not find similar changes in the references added by patent examiners.