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DRUID 2017 PDW
THE DIRECTION OF INNOVATION & SCIENCE
MONDAY 12TH JUNE 9AM-12PM
Co-Organizers: Florenta Teodoridis (USC), Valentina Tartari (CBS), & Jeff Furman (Boston U)
Speakers: Kevin Bryan (U Toronto), Kevin Boudreau (Northeastern U), Kirk Doran (Notre Dame), Jeff Furman (Boston U), Josh Krieger (MIT-Sloan), Keld Laursen (Copenhagen Business School), Valentina Tartari (Copenhagen Business School), Florenta Teodoridis (USC), Keyvan Vakili (London Business School)
Overview:
In 2011, Peter Thiel, the high profile founder of PayPal and Palantir turned technology investor, famously published an investment manifesto with the subtitle, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." This provocative remark on contemporary technological evolution highlights a first order question of why innovation takes the direction that it does.
Interest in the factors that affect the rate and direction of technical change has been sustained for more than a half century because of the central importance of knowledge for economic growth and because of the interest of public policy in supporting the accretion of ideas-driven growth. However, since the NBER's seminal publication of the volume, The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity in 1962, researchers have made more progress in studying drivers of the rate than the direction of inventive activity.
In this PDW, we will bring together scholars who are addressing this deficit through the use of tools that leverage advances in empirical methods, computing power, and text-based analysis. The tools, techniques, and research approaches we will discuss in the PDW are pushing to develop approaches to measure the progress of knowledge in "ideas space," i.e., along varying knowledge trajectories.
We plan to devote approximately two hours of the PDW to the presentation of and discussion of cutting-edge theory and methods and the final hour to panel-led discussion. We welcome participation from all scholars interested in cumulative technical advance, the direction of research, researcher project choice, and research metrics.
Program
Welcome & overview
Presenters (in alphabetical order) and topic:
Kevin Bryan (U Toronto – Rotman) – Theory & direction
Kevin Boudreau (Northeastern U) – Laboratory & field experiments
Kirk Doran (Notre Dame) – Natural experiments in direction
Josh Krieger (MIT-Sloan) – Direction in drug discovery, using data on molecular distance from Jaccard coefficients
Valentina Tartari (Copenhagen Business School) – Measuring direction from researcher career histories (CVs)
Florenta Teodoridis (USC) & Jeff Furman (Boston U) – Use of topic modeling (machine learning) algorithms for measuring direction
Keyvan Vakili (London Business School) – Measuring link between agency funding choices and research direction
Panel discussion, led by Keld Laursen (Copenhagen Business School), with the goals of synthesizing the presentations, formulating questions to the panelists, and, most importantly, facilitating discussion from the PDW participants
No formal registration is needed. We very much look forward to seeing you at DRUID17!
Valentina, Jeff and Florenta
Florenta Teodoridis
Assistant Professor, Strategy
Marshall School of Business, USC
701 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90089
213-821-0852