Michael Blomfield
Assistant Professor of Management
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
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Incentivizing Effort Allocation Through Resource Allocation: Evidence from Scientists’ Response to Changes in Funding Policy (w/ Keyvan Vakili)
Organization Science, 34(1): https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1565
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A wide range of organizations sponsor academic science to attract research to topics of strategic interest to the sponsor. Yet we know little about how effectively sponsoring organizations can steer the research direction of academic scientists. Academic scientists face a dual incentive structure. On one hand, incentives from a reputational reward system promote research in topics deemed most promising by the scientific community. On the other hand, incentives also emerge from differences in costs of conducting research on different topics. Sponsoring organizations aim to influence the latter. However, we argue that the exponentially skewed reputational rewards associated with promising scientific topics can limit the effectiveness of this channel. Consequently, sponsors may fail to induce a scientist to switch to research topics that are of interest to the sponsor but deemed less promising by the scientific community. We test our prediction by exploiting a policy change in funding for stem cell research in the United States in 2001. This reallocated resources from the topics deemed most promising to other areas of stem cell research. We find little evidence that U.S. scientists reallocated research efforts to those areas. In fact, we observe changes in scientific productivity, collaboration patterns, and mobility to industry that suggest U.S. scientists might have reduced their investments in the less promising areas to secure new sources of funding for research in the more promising areas. Our results provide novel insights into how scientists strategically respond to external incentives aimed at influencing their research direction.
TRIPS and Knowledge Diffusion from Low- and Middle-Income Countries, (w/ Anita McGahan and Keyvan Vakili)
Strategic Management Journal: https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.70026
Scholars studying systems of innovation have examined whether the Trade-Related Intellectual Property System (TRIPS) Agreement has benefited low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) that were compelled to comply as a condition of membership in the World Trade Organization. A number of mechanisms involving incentives, innovation, and knowledge diffusion have been explored, with mixed and weak evidence of delayed benefits for LMICs from TRIPS. In this paper, we examine an underexplored effect of TRIPS, namely the dissemination after TRIPS of scientific knowledge from LMICs into high-income countries (HICs) that may have accelerated both discovery and commercialization of drugs relevant specifically to patients in LMICs. In difference-in-difference analyses, we find significant evidence of increased diffusion of scientific knowledge that had been published prior to TRIPS by authors located in LMICs. This and several associated findings suggest that the implementation of TRIPS in LMICs is strongly associated with changes in the behavior of scientists in HICs. The results raise new questions regarding the effects of TRIPS and, more broadly, of patent protection on incentives, institutions, and knowledge diffusion. They also point to a complex impact of TRIPS involving the exportation of science from LMICs for subsequent drug development. We find a rapid increase in scientific attention to pre-existing articles from authors in countries that implement TRIPS and that this knowledge also increasingly diffuses into the patent literature over time. Notably, these attention effects are especially pronounced for neglected diseases and it is primarily academic scientists who primarily increase the use of this knowledge in patented inventions.
WORKING PAPERS
If You Build It, They Will Come: Clinical Trial Experience and African Science, (w/ Caroline Fry)
Revise & Resubmit, Strategic Management Journal
Grand challenges in global health require coordinated scientific effort across borders, particularly in regions where local research ecosystems remain underdeveloped. This paper studies how mission-oriented collaborative platforms can expand much needed research and build capacity by examining a major initiative supporting internationally collaborative clinical trials in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using career histories of African scientists, we document who participates in the platform and estimate the effects of participation on research trajectories. Participation substantially increases clinical-research productivity, with particularly large gains for early-career scientists. We analyze several channels through which scientists may gain from participation and highlight the important role of knowledge and skill accumulation alongside effects on increased networks and visibility. Our findings highlight how global collaborative platforms can advance scientific capabilities in low-resource settings and better position local researchers to address pressing health challenges.
Orchestrating Innovation in Pharmaceutical Science in Low- and Middle-Income Countries after TRIPS, (w/ Gabriel Cavalli, Anita McGahan and Keyvan Vakili)
Revise & Resubmit, Strategic Management Journal
This paper examines how the implementation of TRIPS affected foundational scientific capacity in low-, lower-middle-, and upper-middle-income countries, with a focus on the grand challenge of addressing neglected diseases. Using an abductive approach that combines staggered difference-in-differences analysis with qualitative case studies, we find heterogeneous effects: TRIPS compliance coincided with improvements in disease diagnosis in low-income countries, expansions in scientific publication and collaboration in lower-middle-income countries, and modest gains in neglected disease research in upper-middle-income countries. Our conceptual framework emphasizes the sequential development of needs articulation, knowledge production, and knowledge exchange, with orchestrators playing a critical role in shaping national responses. The findings highlight how global policies interact with local institutional capacity and underscore the importance of orchestrated action for advancing innovation toward grand challenge goals.
Scientific Human Capital and Institutional Incentives: The Roles of Topic Knowledge and Research Skills
Finalist, Best Conference Paper, Strategic Management Society Annual Conference
Academic scientists develop deep topic knowledge in highly specialized niches. However, they also acquire extensive skills to undertake advanced research in their fields. Prior research examining how firms use scientists’ human capital has typically focused on a generalist-specialist distinction in breadth of knowledge or a basic-applied distinction in research orientation. This paper emphasizes an alternative distinction between two components of scientific human capital: topic knowledge and scientific research skills. I build on prior literature on scientific careers and the respective goals of academic and corporate science to document how this distinction sheds light on scientists’ research outcomes after moving to industry employment. There is a pronounced within-scientist shift in research strategies after transitions to industry: Scientists persistently explore more new-to-the-scientist concepts in their projects while simultaneously re-using known research skills at an increased rate. I also provide evidence that industry employers select scientists with greater and more diverse experience using a wider range of research tools and techniques. The findings are consistent with industry prioritizing the ability to apply the research skills of scientists hired from academia across a wider range of projects in their field.
Diversity, Openness, and the Social Context of Innovation: Evidence from Civil Rights Protests
Best Paper Proceedings, STR Division, Academy of Management Annual Meetings
The rate of innovation and technological change is not just a question of innovation incentives, but also thew ability of would-be innovators to identify new ideas and innovation opportunities. The environment in which people are located, in part, shapes the ways they can conceive of new opportunities – alongside individual- or organization-level factors. This paper examines the social context of innovation. In particular, I analyze how changes in a local environment that increase openness and tolerance to diversity affect local innovation rates. I use historical patent data during the twenty-year period from 1955 to 1974 to identify county-level patent rates based on the location of inventors. I match this to data on the location of U.S. civil rights protests from 1960 to 1964 inclusive, during which time public participation in, and attention to, the civil rights movement peaked. I show that areas in which there were local civil rights protests in the early-1960s experienced higher rates of innovation from the mid-1960s. I control for a range of demographic variables and use local precipitation as an instrument for protests to support a causal interpretation of my results. While the primary social value of the civil rights movement is its hard-won gains for marginalized groups, it had the second order effect of increasing innovation in areas with more active local movements. Prior research has shown that local protests increased liberal social values in the local population. My findings suggest that this change in the local social context also led to increased innovation. The results demonstrate the importance of social norms and values to innovation. Additionally, at a time when some policymakers and commentators implicitly frame protests for civil rights as representing zero-sum group competition, the results also show how change induced by movements for equality can lead to broad-based gains for society.