Incentives and creativity: evidence from the academic life sciences

By Pierre Azoulay, Joshua Graff Zivin, Gustavo Manso. 2011

634 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite its presumed role as an engine of economic growth, we know surprisingly little about the drivers of scientific creativity. In this paper, we exploit key differences across funding streams within the academic life sciences to estimate the impact of incentives on the rate and direction of scientific exploration. Specifically, we study the careers of investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which tolerates early failure, rewards long-term success, and gives its appointees great freedom to experiment; and grantees from the National Institute of Health, which are subject to short review cycles, pre-defined deliverables, and renewal policies unforgiving of failure. Using a combination of propensity-score weighting and difference-in-differences estimation strategies, we find that HHMI investigators produce high- impact papers at a much higher rate than a control group of similarly-accomplished NIH-funded scientists. Moreover, the direction of their research changes in ways that suggest the program induces them to explore novel lines of inquiry.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea561cfd198093d9e3451972307a0f8ba79136af

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

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Citations in the corpus

Matthew: Effect or Fable? (2014, positive): “Appointees also are recipients of large research budgets and may benefit from intangible assistance such as editorial goodwill and access to advice from an elite peer group (Azoulay et al. 2011).”
The Impact of Stakeholder Orientation on Innovation: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (2016, methodology): “With the exception of a few studies that examine the potential influence of employeefriendly policies on innovation (e.g., Azoulay et al. 2011), very little is known about the impact of stakeholder orientation (i.e., the attention to nonfinancial stakeholders) on innovation.”
Are employee-friendly workplaces conducive to innovation? (2016, background): “Drawing upon recent insights that tolerance for failure is a key driver of innovation (Azoulay et al., 2011; Tian and Wang, 2014), we hypothesize that firms with employee-friendly workplaces invest more heavily in innovation and achieve greater innovation success.”
Prizes and Productivity (2015, positive): “Finally, Azoulay et al. (2011) explore the impact of funding at the start of a scientist's career on subsequent productivity.”
Corporate Innovation Along the Supply Chain (2018, positive): “Recent empirical research testing the implications of Manso (2011) includes Azoulay et al. (2011) who explore key differences across funding streams within the academic life science, Ederer and Manso (2013) who conduct a controlled laboratory experiment, Tian and Wang (2014) who show that IPO firms ”