Essays on Biomedical Innovation
Essays on Biomedical Innovation

Author: Wesley H. Greenblatt

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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The choice of what scientists decide to study is fundamental to determining what innovations are produced. Yet, rather than being solely determined by a scientist's idiosyncratic preferences, this choice is shaped in important ways by the incentives, organization environment, and supporting institutions that surround a researcher. This dissertation consists of three essays that use biomedicine as a setting to explore how institutions and organizational environment can shape the rate and direction of innovation. In the first essay, I examine how knowledge certification by professional medical society clinical practice guidelines shapes the use of extant knowledge. Employing a difference-in-differences approach, I find that after inclusion in a guideline affected subfields of knowledge grow in size and scientific impact compared to controls carefully matched on observables. Rather than the aperture of subsequent innovation narrowing, subfields shift towards exploration as they become more translational, more intellectually distant, more disruptive, and build on more diverse and less established prior research. In the second essay, I investigate how exposure to frontier research in a training program can alter the career trajectories of potential innovators. I study the careers and innovative output of physicians who applied to the Associate Training Programs of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the turbulent period surrounding the Vietnam War. I find program participants entered research-focused positions at higher rates and garnered more publications, citations and grant funding than synthetic controls. In particular, the direction of their research efforts was durably imprinted with a distinct "translational" style of biomedical research that was characteristic of the NIH at the time. In the third essay, I study how a specific institution, grant peer review, shapes scientific risk taking. While risk is an inherent aspect of innovation, those projects with high degrees of risk may be more likely to lead to breakthrough innovation yet may face challenges in winning the support necessary to be carried out. I analyze R01-equivalent grants from the NIH, and after carefully controlling for investigator, grant and institution characteristics, find that grants with high levels of risk taking are renewed at lower rates.

Essays in Medical Sociology
Essays in Medical Sociology

Author: Renée Claire Fox

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published:

Total Pages: 742

ISBN-13: 9781412822770

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This outstanding collection of essays by Renee C. Fox encompasses almost thirty years of original, pioneering research in the sociology of medicine. Based on fieldwork in a variety of medical settings in the United States, Belgium, and Zaire, these ethnographic essays examine chronic and terminal illness, medical research, therapeutic innovation, medical education and socialization, and bio-ethics. Within this framework, three empirical "cases" have been singled out for special scrutiny--the process of becoming a physician, the development of the artificial kidney machine and organ transplantation, and the evolution of medical research in Belgium. Without ignoring social structural or psychodynamic factors, Dr. Fox has explored basic cultural phenomena and questions associated with health, illness, and medicine: values, beliefs, symbols, rites, and the nuances of language: ethical and existential dilemmas and dualities; and the complex interrelationships between medicine, science, religion, and magic. She draws systematically and imaginatively upon anthropological, psychological, historical, and biological insights and integrates observations and analyses from her own studies in American, Western European, and Central African societies. This second, augmented edition includes Professor Fox's more recent contributions to the expanding field of the sociology of medicine. They are "The Evolution of Medical Uncertainty; The Human Condition of Health Professionals; Reflections on the Utah Artificial Heart Program; Is Religion Important in Belgium?; Medical Morality is Not Bioethics"--"Medical Ethics in China and the United States; "and "Medicine, Science and Technology. "The work also includes a new introduction, "Endings, Beginnings and Continuities." Now, anthropologists, sociologists, medical educators, scientists, researchers, and students can join her on her "journeys into the field" and share with her the priceless insights to be gained from the physicians, nurses, medical students, patients, and their families, who are working, living, and dying on the edge of what is known, scrutable, and remediable--on the edge of medical science.

Three Essays on the Costs of Inducing Innovation
Three Essays on the Costs of Inducing Innovation

Author: Kyle R. Myers

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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This dissertation explores the costs and benefits of inducing innovation at the level of markets, individuals and knowledge. First, I examine the extent to which the National Institutes of Health can direct its resources and generate production in specific areas of science. I find that it can, and that science funded through these directed efforts is significantly more productive than average. Second, I identify how willing individual scientists are to adjust the trajectories of their research in exchange for additional resources--the elasticity of direction. Estimated magnitudes suggest that the directional adjustment costs of biomedical science are large enough to warrant policy attention. Finally, in joint work with Mark Pauly, we explore the growing costs of R&D in the pharmaceutical industry in order to identify how much might be efficient cost growth in response to a larger market. Almost all of the growth in R&D spending can be attributed to demand, with no evidence that marginal investments have become less productive over the past thirty years.

Essays on the Production of Ideas
Essays on the Production of Ideas

Author: Soomi Kim

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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Old ideas serve as critical inputs in the production of new ideas. In order to generate knowledge, innovators "stand on the shoulders of giants," the great thinkers who came before, whose ideas serve as the foundation to build on. In this dissertation, I rely on rich empirical data in biomedical settings to identify factors that drive or hinder this cumulative process of knowledge production. The first essay focuses on how knowledge workers innovate in new domains without giants, where there are only few existing ideas to build on. Using the setting of structural biology, I explore how a new technological tool--the automation of analogical reasoning--allowed innovators to import knowledge from an adjacent domain, bypassing the need to build knowledge from the ground up. In the second essay, I turn to how institutions can shape innovative outcomes, particularly when the shoulders of giants rest on a weak foundation. I document that poor communication among different institutional parties of the patent system likely led to the prevalence of biomedical patents based on erroneous or fraudulent science, reducing incentives for innovation. Finally, in the third essay, I highlight the role of private sector polices--specifically, insurance design--in steering the direction of firms' R&D efforts in drug development.

Beyond Technonationalism
Beyond Technonationalism

Author: Kathryn C. Ibata-Arens

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-04-16

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1503608751

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The biomedical industry, which includes biopharmaceuticals, genomics and stem cell therapies, and medical devices, is among the fastest growing worldwide. While it has been an economic development target of many national governments, Asia is currently on track to reach the epicenter of this growth. What accounts for the rapid and sustained economic growth of biomedicals in Asia? To answer this question, Kathryn Ibata-Arens integrates global and national data with original fieldwork to present a conceptual framework that considers how national governments have managed key factors, like innovative capacity, government policy, and firm-level strategies. Taking China, India, Japan, and Singapore in turn, she compares each country's underlying competitive advantages. What emerges is an argument that countries pursuing networked technonationalism (NTN) effectively upgrade their capacity for innovation and encourage entrepreneurial activity in targeted industries. In contrast to countries that engage in classic technonationalism—like Japan's developmental state approach—networked technonationalists are global minded to outside markets, while remaining nationalistic within the domestic economy. By bringing together aggregate data at the global and national level with original fieldwork and drawing on rich cases, Ibata-Arens telegraphs implications for innovation policy and entrepreneurship strategy in Asia—and beyond.

Human Aspects of Biomedical Innovation
Human Aspects of Biomedical Innovation

Author: Everett Mendelsohn

Publisher: Cambridge, Mass : Harvard University Press

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13:

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This book discusses the social control of new biomedical technologies and the problems in organization and delivery of medical care in the face of new technological and social change.

Human Aspects of Biomedical Innovation
Human Aspects of Biomedical Innovation

Author: Everett Mendelsohn

Publisher: Cambridge, Mass : Harvard University Press

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13:

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This book discusses the social control of new biomedical technologies and the problems in organization and delivery of medical care in the face of new technological and social change.

Essays on Institutions and Innovation
Essays on Institutions and Innovation

Author: Deepak Hegde

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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The three chapters of this dissertation analyze the influence of three fundamental institutions - markets, law, and politics - on the generation and commercialization of new ideas (innovation). The analyses are empirical, and apply the theoretical perspectives of economics, law, and political science. The first chapter asks: how do real world managers deal with adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the market for ideas? To answer this question, the chapter analyzes a new sample of 505 of arm's-length contracts, negotiated during the 1995-2008 years, between inventors and developers of biomedical inventions. The statistical findings are consistent with agency theories that propose mitigating the information problems with two-part payments consisting of upfront fees and output-based royalty rates. But I also find that licenses include other types of payments (viz. minimum royalty payments and milestone payments) to address the transaction costs of verifying outputs and the uncertainty associated with developing novel inventions. The second chapter investigates political influence in the allocation of public funds for the generation of ideas. The chapter studies U.S. Congressional appropriations committee bills and documents, and argues that although appropriators do not earmark federal funds for biomedical research performers, they support allocations for those research fields that are most likely to benefit performers in their constituencies. The econometric analysis uses data on peer reviewed grants by the National Institutes of Health during the years 1984-2003, and finds that performers in the states of certain House appropriations committee members receive 5.9-10.3% more research funds as compared to unrepresented institutions. Members appear to support funding for the projects of represented research performers in fields in which they are relatively weak, and counteract the distributive effect of the peer review process. The third chapter (coauthored with Professors David C. Mowery and Stuart J.H. Graham) exploits the Y1995 change in U.S. patent term to understand the use of continuations by firms in the prosecution of their patents during the years 1981-2000. The findings suggest that biomedical firms use continuations to lengthen the duration of patents protecting their most valuable ideas, while electronics and semiconductor firms use the process to augment the size of their patent portfolios. Firms use different types of continuations - the Continuation Application, the Continuations-In-Part, and Divisions - for different ends. Hence, U.S. patent laws, and their reform, can benefit from a closer consideration of the type of continuation filed by applicants.

Managing Discovery in the Life Sciences
Managing Discovery in the Life Sciences

Author: Philip A. Rea

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 557

ISBN-13: 1108675549

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In this book, distinguished scholars Philip A. Rea, Mark V. Pauly, and Lawton R. Burns explore the science and management behind marketable biomedical innovations. They look at how the science actually played out through the interplay of personalities, the cultures within and between academic and corporate entities, and the significance of serendipity not as a mysterious phenomenon but one intrinsic to the successes and failures of the experimental approach. With newly aggregated data and case studies, they consider the fundamental economic underpinnings of investor-driven discovery management, not as an obstacle or deficiency as its critics would contend or as something beyond reproach as some of its proponents might claim, but as the only means by which scientists and managers can navigate the unknowable to discover new products and decide how to sell them so as to maximize the likelihood of establishing a sustainable pipeline for still more marketable biomedical innovations.