How Does Co-Location Affect the Rate and Direction of Innovative Activity?

Submitted by catalini
on Wed, 07/11/2012 - 17:54

The ability of an economy to generate, recombine and diffuse new ideas has a profound influence on its ability to sustain growth. Agglomeration, by eliminating the physical space between people, firms and ideas, affects not only the rate of innovation, but also the type of idea recombinations that take place. While the role of co-location on innovation has been extensively studied, the micro-foundations of knowledge transfer and generation still remain undeveloped.

Co-location, by increasing the frequency of interactions with very low expected value, qualitatively transforms the knowledge that is recombined, allowing for high levels of "exploration". This is particularly important when the uncertainty surrounding idea quality is high (e.g. early-stage research) and the outcome distribution is very skewed (e.g. scientific breakthroughs).

Leveraging a natural experiment, I analyze how geographic proximity impacts the recombination of ideas using a novel dataset of department relocations at UPMC Paris (1995-2010). Collaborations across departments pairs are compared before and after co-location, a change that disproportionately affects low expected value interactions. Results are consistent with the idea that proximity has a profound influence both on the rate and the direction of innovative activity.

The Geography of Crowdfunding

Submitted by catalini
on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 00:00

Ajay K. Agrawal, Christian Catalini, Avi Goldfarb

NBER Working Paper No. 16820
Issued in February 2011
NBER Program(s):   PR

Perhaps the most striking feature of "crowdfunding" is the broad geographic dispersion of investors in small, early-stage projects. This contrasts with existing theories that predict entrepreneurs and investors will be co-located due to distance-sensitive costs. We examine a crowdfunding setting that connects artist-entrepreneurs with investors over the internet for financing musical projects.

Applications to the Creative Destruction Lab are now open!

Submitted by catalini
on Fri, 09/07/2012 - 13:50

The mission of the Creative Destruction Lab is to facilitate the creation and growth of massively scalable, technology-based companies from the University of Toronto community. Applications are now open at: http://www.creativedestructionlab.com/apply

Serious bug in STATA's insheet command

Submitted by catalini
on Mon, 09/26/2011 - 00:00

I've come across a bug in STATA's insheet command that is quite worrisome.

Many power users will have their original datasets in raw text format. This is often the case for data coming from a variety of sources (public datasets, data downloaded or scraped from the Internet, etc). Not only it is a good habit to store data as raw text, but it also reduces lock-in with a specific platform or software. You are more likely to open that file again in 5-10 years if it's in a pure text format.

A common format for raw text files is the tab-delimited one, as tabs rarely appear in data.

Tags: 
STATA
bug

Intellectual Property Disclosure in Open Standards Development

Submitted by catalini
on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 00:00

Timothy Simcoe and Christian Catalini

Firms typically want to know whether a technology is covered by Intellectual Property (IP) rights before making it an industry standard. To promote transparency, Standard Setting Organizations require participants to disclose their IP during technical deliberations. We study the effectiveness of these policies. Specifically, we examine a large sample of IP disclosures and find that these declarations are often not very informative.

Tags: 
standards
SSO
IP

Does Distance Matter in Online Entrepreneurial Finance? Evidence from Crowd-Funding in the Arts

Submitted by catalini
on Sun, 10/31/2010 - 00:00

Ajay Agrawal, Christian Catalini, Avi Goldfarb

Abstract

The most striking feature of “crowd-funding” for early stage entrepreneurial projects is the broad geographic dispersion of investors. This stands in stark contrast to existing theories that predict entrepreneurs and investors will be co-located due to distance-sensitive costs.

Tags: 
crowdfunding

Crowdfunding paper wins summer grant from NET institute

Submitted by catalini
on Mon, 06/28/2010 - 00:00

The working paper on the geography of crowd-funding I've been working on with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb, received a summer grant from the NET institute.

 About the NET institute: "The Networks, Electronic Commerce and Telecommunications ("NET") Institute is a non-profit institution devoted to research on network industries, electronic commerce, telecommunications, the Internet, "virtual networks" comprised of computers that share the same technical standard or operating system, and on network issues in general.

Tags: 
crowdfunding
NET institute

Tracing the links between science and technology: An exploratory analysis of scientists’ and inventors’ networks

Submitted by catalini
on Fri, 03/26/2010 - 00:00

The paper provides an exploratory analysis of the research networks linking scientists working in an open science environment, and researchers involved in the private technology domain. The study combines data on scientific co-authorship with data on patent co-invention, at the level of individual researchers, for three science-intensive technology fields, i.e. lasers, semiconductors and biotechnology, in order to assess the extent of the overlap between the two communities and to identify the role of key individuals in the process of knowledge transfer.

Tags: 
science
technology
social network analysis

SSO patents and disclosures database

Submitted by catalini
on Sat, 08/08/2009 - 00:00

This page links to a database containing information from the combined IPR disclosure statements made at several major Standard Setting Organizations. Please let us know if you find a new use for this information. If you have questions, or would like to help us collect more data on IPRs linked to industry standards, please contact either Tim or Christian using the links on the website.

http://www.ssopatents.org

A first draft of the paper behind the dataset will be presented by Tim at the AoM annual meeting in Chicago (TIM, BPS) on Monday, August 10th from 8:00-9:30am:

Markets Making Music - Sellaband and Angie Arsenault

Submitted by catalini
on Tue, 02/10/2009 - 00:00

From Events and Media Relations @ Rotman:

"Synopsis: In 1999, an unknown Northeastern University student named Shawn Fanning released – with little fanfare – a program for sharing music over the Internet. Despite its modest dorm room origins, that innovation and subsequent permutations had a devastating effect on the recorded music industry worldwide. In Canada, for example, revenues declined by a stunning 50% between 1999 and 2007, after adjusting for inflation.

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