Grilichesian Breakthroughs: Inventions of Methods of Inventing and Firm Entry in Nanotechnology

By Michael R. Darby, Lynne G. Zucker. 2005

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Metamorphic progress (productivity growth much faster than average) is often driven by Grilichesian inventions of methods of inventing. For hybrid seed corn, the enabling invention was double-cross hybridization yielding highly productive seed corn that was not self-propagating. Biotechnology stemmed from recombinant DNA. Scanning probe microscopy is a key enabling discovery for nanotechnology. Nanotech publishing and patenting has grown phenomenally. Over half of nanotech authors are in the U.S. and 58 percent of those are in ten metropolitan areas. Like biotechnology, we find that firms enter nanotechnology where and when scientists are publishing breakthrough academic articles. A high average education level is also important, but the past level of venture-capital activity in a region is not - it is easier to move venture capital and capitalists than the scientists possessing tacit knowledge of the new discoveries. Breakthroughs in nanoscale science and engineering appear frequently to be transferred to industrial application with the active participation of discovering academic scientists. The need for top scientists' involvement provided important appropriability for biotechnology inventions, and a similar process appears to have started in nanotechnology.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87309e9287aa866982f9dc5af942cf765e70c5c8

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Citations in the corpus

Rationales and mechanisms for revitalizing US manufacturing R&D strategies (2010, background): “Such a view inaccurately represents the modern technology-based economy because it does not take into account the quasi-public-good content of technology research with its implications for the correct balance between public and private funding for R&D.”
Is there complementarity or substitutability between internal and external R&D strategies? (2012, background): “In contrast, there is essentially no lag time between the completed invention and the patent application date, which is on average no more than three months (Darby and Zucker, 2003).”
The influence of supply network structure on firm innovation (2014, background): “Using a granted patent’s application date allows us to have a closer indication of when the invention occurred, as an invention is estimated to have occurred about three months prior to the patent application date [86].”
The emergence of new technology-based sectors in European regions: A proximity-based analysis of nanotechnology (2014, methodology): “3 >>> INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUR HERE Consistent with work using United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) data (Darby and Zucker, 2005), Figure 1 shows that there was marked growth in the number of nanotechnology patents in the second half of the 1980s and especially in the second half of…”
University entrepreneurship: a taxonomy of the literature (2007, background): “More importantly, the integration and interaction of the four streams mirror the dynamic and evolutionary process of the university innovation system.”