Studying innovation
Innovation research: the history of a new directionIvan Sterligov, OPEC.Ru
About 50 years ago, a new direction emerged in science: the study of innovation.
Recently, one of the first descriptions of how the emerging science has developed and what it does has appeared.
Most educated Russians, having met the phrase "innovation research", imagine clever experts speaking at party forums and processing state millions into concepts and reports of dubious quality. However, in the rest of the world, innovation research is gradually becoming a separate and full-fledged academic discipline. Its uniqueness is determined by the unique position of innovation at the intersection of science, business and public policy.
The goals, structure and subject field of emerging science were explored in a recent article by Jan Fagerberg and Bart Verspagen: Innovation studies—The emerging structure of a new scientific field (Research Policy, Volume 38, Issue 2, March 2009, Pages 218-233. There is a draft version in the public domain). They relied on the data accumulated in the literature and on the results of their own surveys of more than 1,000 specialists from around the world.
The origins and meaning of innovation researchThe word "innovation" is on everyone's lips.
It is believed that this is the key to the prosperity of firms and states. Thousands of consultants convince companies of the need for their advice and services, thousands of politicians place innovation at the top of government priorities. In 2007, at least 135 specialized analytical centers around the world studied innovations, over 80% of them were located at universities. A separate academic discipline with faculties, bachelors, masters and postgraduates has not yet developed, but this is a matter of the near future, the authors predict.
But the scientific direction has long been not synonymous with "discipline". Researchers do not have to choose an academic form to present what they understand – the variety of forms is constantly growing. The main thing is to have available means of communication (magazines and conferences), common quality standards and a system of material and reputational encouragement of good results. All this is already there, there is only a problem with the recognition of innovation studies by the rest of the scientific world.
The skeptical attitude towards innovation researchers is largely due to the fact that the general scientific community does not understand what these researchers are doing. To lift the veil of secrecy, Fagerberg and Fershpagen briefly described the history of the direction.
Schumpeter, Greeliches and the restUntil the 1960s, few articles on innovation were published (see Figure 1). The only and most important exception were the works of the famous Austro-American economist Joseph Schumpeter.
First, he introduced the concept of entrepreneurship ("entrepreneurship") and studied the impact of the business cycle on the birth and death of businesses, and then, while working at Harvard, turned to big business as a source of innovation capable of financing R&D.
However, by the time of Schumpeter's death, in the 1950s, the economy was dominated by static, equilibrium mathematical theories and tools characteristic of the neoclassical school. Soon, however, scientists and politicians appreciated the importance of the processes of long-term scientific, technical and social development that did not fit into the grid of equations. Since the 1960s, the rise in innovation research has begun, which continues to this day.
This rise started in the USA. Already at the beginning of the cold war, the country's leadership realized that global superiority is possible only with the preservation of technological leadership. Not only research and technology centers were created, but also organizations involved in the management and economics of the R&D sector.
The main one, of course, is the RAND Corporation, which emerged in 1946 on the initiative of the US Air Force. It was at RAND that reputable economists Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter worked. But there were also university employees among the founding fathers of innovative research. The most famous of them is Zvi Grilihes, who, using the example of hybrid corn, showed that innovations spread in a market economy along a logistic curve.
In 1962, RAND economists in collaboration with colleagues, including Greelichesom, published a major joint monograph "The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity", which investigated the origin of inventions, the relationship between science and industrial R&D, the allocation of resources for optimal knowledge generation. This work is available online.
But, having originally appeared in the USA, the center of scientific activity quickly moved to Europe, where most innovation research centers are now located. The first and model for the rest was the Science Policy Research Unit of the University of Sussex, created in 1965 by Christopher Freeman. It brought together under one roof economists, sociologists, psychologists and people from the field of engineering and technology, who developed the first special master's and doctoral programs. In addition to teaching and its own scientific work, the center began to actively attract third-party customers. SPRU specialists investigated the factors influencing the success of innovations and their relationship with the labor market. Perhaps the most famous is their 1988 collective monograph "Technical Change and Economic Theory".
In addition, in 1972, Freeman founded the most respected journal of innovation researchers today: Research Policy. At the turn of the 1980-90s, several more journals appeared, as well as conferences organized by the International Schumpeter Society (ISS), the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (DRUID) and other organizations.
Structure and institutionsIn recent years, the literature on innovation has reached such impressive volumes that it is almost impossible to generalize it.
Fagerberg and Fershpagen, however, were able to identify an array of texts that became the core of a new direction. They recognized "An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change" by Nelson and Winter as the most classic book for today. This work contains a new theory of the foundations of economic growth at the firm level, which differs significantly from the neoclassical one with its profit maximization and market equilibrium and is more adequate to the field of innovation.
In order to find out the composition and structure of innovation research, Fagerberg and Fershpagen conducted an e-mail survey of more than a thousand of their colleagues, collecting them using the "snowball" method. Figure 2 shows how innovative experts answered the question about their "native discipline". Almost 60% come from the economy. Interestingly, 71% of all respondents work in the EU, and only 17% work in the USA. The authors believe that this is due to a higher proportion of American scientists who de facto study innovation, but relate themselves to other fields (for example, management). In addition, it is in European universities that most of the scientific and educational centers of the SPRU type are concentrated.
The survey also included the item "the scientist who inspired you the most". It turned out that although Schumpeter, Nelson and Freeman dominate by a margin, Bengt-Ake Lundvall, one of the creators of the concept of the "National Innovation System", and Karl Marx also got into the top 10.
The most authoritative journal among innovation researchers is Research Policy, followed by Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Economics of Innovation and new Technology. ISS, DRUID, European Association for Research in Industrial Economics and Academy of Management are popular among the conferences.
Cluster analysis of the responses allowed us to identify two large groups, each of which unites about a third of innovation researchers. The first, "Schumpeterians", demonstrates the greatest unity in the choice of journals, conferences, classics. It consists mainly of European economists.
The second group unites geographers and specialists in scientific, technical and innovation policy who study national innovation systems. These two groups together already number several thousand researchers and are markedly different from the rest working in the field of management, industrial economics and other disciplines. The only indisputable connecting feature for all respondents is their commitment to the journal Research Policy.
There are no conferences and associations common to the whole problem field yet, which reflects some disunity, as well as the difference in the topics of European and American authors. This is the most serious organizational obstacle to the development of the direction, Fagerberg and Fershpagen conclude.
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Russian authors have not published a single work in Research Policy, except for an article by Olivier Bertrand, an employee of the St. Petersburg State University Graduate School of Management, about innovations in France. This alone allows us to conclude that the domestic science of innovation has developed in ways different from the world. In the post-Soviet years, there were no incentives and opportunities to join the world community.
Note that at the same time, there are up to a dozen large innovation expert centers operating in the country alone (such as the HSE, RIEPP or CISN), round tables and conferences are constantly held. There are even several faculties of innovation, including the ANH and MIPT. But the analysis of publications in world journals and networks of co-authors does not give reasons for optimism: the current scientific and analytical environment continues to be deeply specific and local. It is in such a reversal that it deserves separate consideration.