Organizations and Innovation Workshop

Organizations and Innovation
Developing a national research data infrastructure for the study of innovation and business performance

Workshop Goal, Rationale, Approach and Outcomes

The goal of the workshop is to identify the components necessary to build an empirical platform for the scientific study of the nation's engines of innovation, economic value creation, and competitiveness: organizations.

In modern economies, economic value is derived increasingly through making and selling ideas. Less than three centuries ago, the primary basis of economic value in human society was the production and trade of food. As a result, social, behavioral and economic thought was grounded in the world of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution created a new social scientific infrastructure. Human beings could now add value by making and selling things other than food, and new social and economic theories, behavioral models, and ways of collecting data on manufacturing firms and workers emerged.¹ The scientific challenge today is to advance our understanding of economic value creation through innovation and knowledge appropriation.

Existing data infrastructures are not sufficient for researchers to model, measure, and study the evolving mechanisms whereby innovating enterprises and entrepreneurs create economic value. The call for better data and metrics on innovation was made clear by the America Competes Act and the report of the Advisory Committee to the Secretary of Commerce, Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century.

The approach is to bring together a small group of business representatives with experts who study organizations, data collection, and confidentiality issues (participant list). The workshop is intended to be an informal venue whereby the group can identify a set of promising research areas that can lead to the development of a national research data infrastructure for the study of organizations and innovation.

The outcome of the workshop will be a white paper that sets forth the key characteristics of such an infrastructure and identify the current opportunities. These characteristics should include

Scientific basis: A scientific framework for data collection
Accessibility: Different approaches to promoting access to ensure the generalizability and replicability of research
Incentives: An incentive structure to ensure that the business community can benefit, and that researchers can be engaged.
Confidentiality: To ensure that individual business information is protected.

By providing examples of research questions and of research data that could be collected and analyzed, participating experts will identify opportunities.

The white paper will be circulated for comment and discussion at a conference for the wider research, policy-making and business community to be held in November, 2008 in Washington.

¹ The ferment is well described in Heibroner's "The Worldly Philosophers"

Background Information

1. Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: the lives, times, and ideas of the great economic thinkers, 7th edition 1995 (New York: Touchstone).
2. International Workshop on New Directions for Innovation Measurement and its Use for Strategy and Policy (available at http://www.cherry.gatech.edu/stip/projects/cis-correlates-2007.htm).
3. OECD: Innovation in Firms: Findings from a Comparative Analysis of Innovation Surveys Microdata DSTI/STP(2008)7/CHAP5.
4. Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century, report of the Advisory Commission to the Secretary of Commerce (available at http://www.innovationmetrics.gov).

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