Technology & Operations Management
Science-Based Business Initiative Seminars
The Science-Based Business Initiative sponsors a lunch time seminar on Fridays that brings academic and industry scientists to campus to describe some of the breakthrough ideas that impact current and future businesses. The 2008-2009 seminars are joint with Economics 2888hf: Economics of Science and Engineering Workshop, Harvard University. The seminars provide an intimate group of faculty and doctoral students to gather in a seminar environment, Baker Library 102, from Noon to 1:30 PM for a presentation and Q/A session.
Please RSVP no later than 72 hours prior to the seminar as lunch will be provided for guests who RSVP. To RSVP or for questions on a seminar or to join a mailing list, please contact sbbi@hbs.edu.
2008-2009 Speakers
| 9/19/08 |
Josh Lerner (Harvard Business School) Private Equity and Long-Run Investment: The Case of Innovation Abstract: A long-standing controversy is whether LBOs relieve managers from shortterm pressures from public shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves are driven by short-term profit motives and sacrifice long-term growth to boost short-term performance. We investigate 495 transactions with a focus on one form of long-term activities, namely investments in innovation as measured by patenting activity. We find no evidence that LBOs are associated with a decrease these activities. Relying on standard measures of patent quality, we find that patents granted to firms involved in private equity transactions are more cited (a proxy for economic importance), show no significant shifts in the fundamental nature of the research, and are more concentrated in the most important and prominent areas of companies' innovative portfolios. |
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| 9/26/08 |
David Kaiser (MIT) Population modeling of the emergence and development of scientific fields "Adventures in Scientometrics: Accounting for Scientific Practice Individually, Institutionally, and Internationally" Abstract: We analyze the temporal evolution of emerging fields within several scientific disciplines in terms of numbers of authors and publications. From bibliographic searches we construct databases of authors, papers, and their dates of publication. We show that the temporal development of each field, while different in detail, is well described by population contagion models, suitably adapted from epidemiology to reflect the dynamics of scientific interaction. Dynamical parameters are estimated and discussed to reflect fundamental characteristics of the field, such as time of apprenticeship and recruitment rate. We also show that fields are characterized by simple scaling laws relating numbers of new publications to new authors, with exponents that reflect increasing or decreasing returns in scientific productivity. |
| 10/03/08 |
Ed Scolnick (Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard) Biography A Scientific Strategic Plan To Revolutionize Psychiatry / Implications for the Pharma Industry Abstract: the diagnosis of biological brain diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar illness is made from a constellation of symptoms from patient to doctor. No chemical biological or physical measurement can be made which aids the diagnosis.The largest single risk factor for a person being beset by these illnesses is genetic. Human genetics now can approach how to unravel the genetic architecture of these complex and important human diseases. The approaches are being used in many fields of medicine . The implications for improving diagnosis and treatment for psychiatric illness will be discussed and the broader implications for discovery research in Pharma companies will be described. |
| 10/17/08 |
Scott Stern (Kellogg) Of Mice and Academics: Examining the Effect of Openness on Innovation Counterparts in industry, academics maintain discretion over their research agenda and allow others to build on their discoveries. This paper examines the relationship between openness and freedom, building on recent models emphasizing that, from an economic perspective, freedom is the granting of control rights to researchers. Within this framework, openness of upstream research does not simply encourage higher levels of downstream exploitation. It also raises the incentives for additional upstream research by encouraging the establishment of entirely new research directions. In other words, within academia, restrictions on scientific openness (such as those created by formal intellectual property (IP)) may limit the diversity and experimentation of basic research itself. We test this hypothesis by examining a "natural experiment" in openness within the academic community: NIH agreements during the late 1990s that circumscribed IP restrictions for academics regarding certain genetically engineered mice. Using a sample of engineered mice that are linked to specific scientific papers (some affected by the NIH agreements and some not), we implement a differences-in-differences estimator to evaluate how the level and type of follow-on research using these mice changes after the NIH-induced increase in openness. We find a significant increase in the level of follow-on research. Moreover, this increase is driven by a substantial increase in the rate of exploration of more diverse research paths. Overall, our findings highlight a neglected cost of IP: reductions in the diversity of experimentation that follows from a single idea. |
| 10/24/08 |
Eva Guinan (Harvard Medical School) Title of Seminar: "Harvard Catalyst: Progress to Date and (Many) Upcoming Challenges" Dr. Eva Guinan is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and renowned for her work on stem cell transplants. Recently she has taken on a leadership role with regard to the $117 million NIH grant focused on advancing translational medical research which was awarded to HMS. She will speak on the objectives, accomplishments and challenges of coordinating 11 Harvard institutions and 18 affiliated hospitals to advance the pace and insight of bench to bedside research. |
| 11/07/08 |
Tom Wei, Victoria Levin and Lindsay Sabik (Kennedy School of Government) Title: "A Referral is Worth a Thousand Ads: The Role of Job Search Networks in the Market for Postdocs." Abstract: The theoretical literature on social networks suggests that personal connections for job searches are beneficial for many outcomes such as turnover, satisfaction, and productivity, but comprehensive empirical evidence is comparatively sparse. We use new data on postdocs to explore the impact of job search methods on outcomes. Postdocs are a particularly fitting group to study for this purpose since the ad hoc nature of their job placement ensures significant variation in search methods, while the large fraction of foreign postdocs in the U.S. generates potentially exogenous variation in search networks. We find evidence that social networks that support placement are weaker for foreign postdocs. Foreign postdocs are more likely to use "impersonal" job search methods, and the resulting difference in job match quality is related to differences in turnover, satisfaction, and productivity between foreign and domestic postdocs. Our findings highlight the importance of "connections" in improving job placement quality. |
| 11/14/08 |
John Golden (The University of Texas at Austin, School of Law) Document: "Introduction to Patent Remedies" Speech Title: "Patent Remedies in Your Face." Abstract: Once a joint domain of inertia and arcana, questions about the remedies for patent infringement now generate heated public debate. A recent Supreme Court decision has generated conflicting answers, from both lower courts and academic commentators, about when courts should issue injunctions forbidding future infringement. On Capitol Hill, Orwellian-named entities representing a variety of industry heavyweights have poured millions into lobbying either to advance or to thwart patent reform. A focus of dispute has been legislative language intended to limit damage awards for infringement. Amidst all the dust kicked up, one thing remains clear. We have little specific sense of what the value of patent remedies either generally is or should be. Such ignorance might inspire despair. In fact, however, it suggests five principles that should guide policymaking on patent remedies: (1) nondiscrimination among business models, (2) nonabsolutism in the formulation and application of legal doctrine, (3) administrability of that legal doctrine, (4) devolution to private parties of significant ability and responsibility to arrange desirable resource allocations, and (5) capacities for learning and adaptation. Although these five principles do not uniquely determine a single best system of patent remedies, they provide a framework for assessing the relative merits of various policy proposals and for suggesting ways in which those proposals can be improved. In particular, the principles have implications for current debates about the availability of permanent injunctions, the proper approach to calculating "reasonable royalty" damages, and possible remedial exemptions for infringers who are independent inventors. |
| 12/05/08 |
Kay-Yut Chen (Hewlett-Packard Laboratories)Seminar Title: "Let Other People Forecast for you: Prediction Markets, Scoring Rules and Trust" Paper: Trust in Forecast Information Sharing Groups consistently perform better than individuals in forecasting future events. The prediction market takes advantage of this phenomenon by allowing people to interact in organized markets governed by well-defined interaction rules. Participants who are more accurate at forecasting future events are rewarded financially. After the success of the Iowa Electronic Market in predicting election results, a cottage industry has sprung up offering the prediction market as a forecasting tool. In the first part of this seminar, I will describe some of the science and pitfalls of the prediction markets. The prediction market cannot function well when there are few participants because of market liquidity problems. I would discuss a two-stage alternate methodology that works with small numbers of individuals. In the first stage, participants' risk behavior is measured. In the second stage, probabilistic information about the relevant future event is solicited from the participants by the use of monetary incentives calculated from a scoring rule. This information is then adjusted according to the participants' risk behavior and aggregated into a single forecast. Experiments show that this method outperforms both the prediction market and the best of the participants. Both methods require the use of structural incentives. However, informal communication is common in most business settings even if the stakes are high. For example, two business leaders may discuss potential business deals over a game of golf. Similarly, forecast information is often shared, without formal rewards, between supply chain partners. We study a scenario of a supplier soliciting forecasts from a manufacturer where there is a strong incentive to exaggerate. Standard theory predicts that simply asking for a forecast will result in a "babbling equilibrium" in which no information will be exchanged. However, laboratory experiments revealed that asking for a forecast works far better than predicted. We propose a new behavioral theory to explain this phenomenon and characterize the trade-off between selfish incentives and trust/honesty. |
| 2/06/09 |
Vetle Torvik (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Neil Smalheiser (University of Illinois in Chicago) Paper One: A Probabilistic Similarity Metric for Medline Records: A Model for Author Name Disambiguation Paper Two: Author Name Disambiguation Seminar Title: "Author Name Disambiguation in Medline and Other Databases." Abstract: Many different individuals share the same name: Stephen King refers to both a horror novelist in Maine and a conservationist in New Zealand. Author name ambiguity is a prevalent issue for large databases such as Medline, Web of Science, Scopus and the US Patent database. Inferring which person authored a given article is made all the more difficult with the rise of multi-author articles that bridge institutions and disciplines. This creates a severe challenge for scholars who would like to study the factors that influence scientific discovery, publication behavior, scientific collaboration, impact of public policy, and social networks in science. In Part One of this talk, Dr. Smalheiser will discuss the problem of inferring who-wrote-what in the biomedical literature. The Arrowsmith project at UIC employed a multi-dimensional statistical model, assisted by machine-learning approaches, which were applied to metadata associated with articles in Medline, and were supplemented with limited external information (such as first names and email addresses extracted from online versions of the articles). The methods were scalable and sufficient to create a high-quality database, Author-ity, that assigns all 15 million articles in Medline to a set of inferred author-individuals. In Part Two of this talk, Dr. Torvik will discuss how to utilize author name disambiguation data for the purpose of analyzing and modeling social networks and collaboration behavior. In order to create a realistic and informative model of collaboration behavior, at least six different types of data need to be obtained and merged: a) Information about individuals and their publication behavior such as their gender, affiliation, geographical location, seniority, expertise, topics, publication dates, productivity, collaborators, citations, funding, and patents. b) Measures relating pairs of individuals such as mentorship (senior vs. junior), topical similarity, social network proximity, geographical proximity, expertise complementarity. c) Measures that go beyond pairs to describe the roles of individuals and structures in the social network such as hubs, bridges, isolates, large communities, smaller cliques, central cores, periphery, and hierarchy. d) Multiple time scales - collaboration behavior has changed collectively over the years, and usually changes during the course of an individual's career. e) Interactive factors that take into account patterns that are context or discipline dependent - some individuals may tend to collaborate preferentially with others in their own field, but this may not apply at all to statisticians. f) Psychological models that can help distinguish behavioral patterns that are deliberate vs. unconscious. Although the examples will come from the biomedical literature, the approaches discussed here should be applicable to other fields and other databases, including those related to business and innovation. |
| 2/20/09 |
Jeff Carter, Business Executive (Bank of America, for the Center for Future Banking) Biography Seminar Title: "Rethinking Banking for the 21st Century." Abstract: Bank of America believes it has discovered an important secret in the quest for innovation at work: find the right questions to ask. We see chief executives quoted on the issue of innovation, we hear everyone talking about it but, in fact, less than two percent of companies worldwide commit to innovation. Truly transformational innovation. The key question is not "how can we innovate?" Nor is it "do we know the benefits of innovation?" The real question is: why do companies continue to commit to their traditional structures and conventional forms of behavior even though they know that these habitual practices are a barrier to the innovation they crave? During this portion of the conference, attendees will learn how Bank of America is redefining the term innovation and how the Center for Future Banking is providing the foundation for the transformation. |
| 3/13/09 |
Iain Cockburn, Professor of Finance and Economics (Boston University School of Management) Paper: "Is the Pharmaceutical Industry in a Productivity Crisis?" Seminar Title: "Is the Pharmaceutical Industry in a Productivity Crisis?"Abstract: Many argue that declining numbers of new drugs approved and rising R&D outlays indicate that the pharmaceutical industry's business model is "broken." A close review of the data suggests that this proposition is wildly overstated. But the changing vertical structure of the industry does raise provocative and difficult questions about future research performance. |
| 3/27/09 |
Alexander Oettl (Strategic Management, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto) Paper: "Productivity, Helpfulness and the Performance of Peers: Exploring the Implications of a New Taxonomy for Star Scientists" Seminar Title: "Helpfulness and Productivity: Implications of a New Taxonomy for Star Scientists." Abstract: It is surprising that the prevailing performance taxonomy for scientists (Star versus Non-Star) focuses only on individual output and ignores social behavior since, despite popular examples of Edison-like lone inventors, innovation is most often characterized as a communal process. The community benefits are largely due to common gains from specialization (innovation as the recombination of ideas) and the social mediation of knowledge flows (geographic proximity, ethnicity, and social networks mediate flows). Furthermore, knowledge transfer is famously difficult to contract for, heightening the value of conditions that favor the sharing of knowledge. Moreover, most strategy and economics research is less interested in innovative output at the individual level and instead focuses on aggregate output at the firm or regional level. To address this deficiency I expand the traditional taxonomy that focuses solely on productivity and add a second, social dimension to the taxonomy of scientists: helpfulness to others. Using academic paper citations to capture scientist productivity and the receipt of academic paper acknowledgements to measure helpfulness, I classify a group of 415 immunologists into four distinct categories of human capital quality: All-Stars who have both high productivity and helpfulness; Lone Wolves who have high productivity but average helpfulness; Mavens who have average productivity but high helpfulness; and Non-Stars who have both average productivity and helpfulness. Looking at the change in quality-adjusted publishing output of an immunologist's coauthors after the immunologist's death, I find that the productivity of coauthors of All-Stars decreases on average by 35%, coauthors of Mavens by 30% on average, and the coauthors of Lone Wolves by 19%, all relative to the decrease in productivity of coauthors of Non-Stars. These findings suggest that our current conceptualization of star scientists, which solely focuses on individual productivity, is both incomplete and potentially misleading as Lone Wolves may be systematically overvalued and Mavens undervalued. |
| 4/03/09 |
Stuart Graham, Ph.D. (The Business School at Georgia Tech) Seminar Title: "High Technology Entrepreneurs and the Patent System: Results of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey." Abstract: We report the results of a survey questionnaire administered to over 15,000 young high-technology firms in the U.S. information technology, biotechnology, and medical device sectors in 2008. We find that high-technology startups are using patenting to increase the likelihood of securing capital and experiencing a successful liquidity event, and that this affect is particularly pronounced among those firms that are venture-funded. Unlike earlier studies of large firms (Cohen, et al. [2000]; Levin et al. [1987]), our results suggest that patenting among small entities today is generally more important to profiting from innovation. We also demonstrate that other forms of intellectual property (trademark and copyright) play a significant role, particularly in software firms. When small firms choose not to patent a major innovation, they cite the costs of patenting and the costs of enforcing the patent as primary reasons. Over one-third of innovating companies did not patent because they believed their major innovations were not patentable. Our results also demonstrate that when high-technology firms seek funding from various sources, patenting often plays an important role in the funding decisions of sources such as venture-capital, angel investors, commercial banks, and "friends and family." Respondents report that during negotiations, over seventy percent of venture-capitalists, and over twenty percent of "friends and family," indicated that firm patenting was an important factor in granting funding. Our results also show that, when taking licenses to patents, small firms are seeking knowledge, but also attempting to settle lawsuits. We find that, among venture-backed information technology firms, twenty-five percent indicate that the last patent the firm licensed-in was taken to settle a lawsuit, but not to gain any technology or know-how. Other findings will be discussed. |
| 4/10/09 |
Kevin Starr (Third Rock Ventures) Seminar Title: "Where did the innovation go? Time to get back to basics" Abstract: Over the last decade there have been many major shifts in the biotech/pharma innovation landscape. Capital markets, M&A, venture capital, academia and pharma/biotech outsourcing have all played major roles in re-shaping the landscape for new start-ups in biotech. Many of these macro indicators point in the direction of driving innovation thru small, newly-formed enterprises. Yet - why are so few new companies getting started? Who is launching the next Genentech, Biogen or even Alnylam's of the industry? What does the future look like for innovation? This lecture will outline some of the major drivers in the last decade that have lead up to the current environment and challenge the current thinking around launching early-stage disruptive life science companies. Paper One: "When Less is More" Paper Two: "Early-Stage Returns?" |
| 4/17/09 |
Larry W. Sumney, President & CEO (Semiconductor Research Corporation) Seminar Title: "The SRC Story" Abstract: This seminar presentation will review historic perspectives of the semiconductor industry that led to the formation of a generic, pre-competitive research consortium for a very competitive industry; the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). Its evolution and challenges will be presented and its major successes will be discussed. The major current task is for SRC to drive new frontiers for the semiconductor industry. Lessons learned in the past 27 years will also be discussed and the usefulness and applicability of the SRC model to other industries will be reviewed. Lastly, a description of the current SRC organization will be described. PowerPoint One: "National Medal of Technology Awarded by President George W. Bush" PowerPoint Two: "National Medal of Technology Citation" |
| 4/24/09 |
Francisco Veloso, Ph.D., Department of Engineering and Public Policy; Program on Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Technological Change (Carnegie Mellon University) Paper: "Navel gazing: Academic inbreeding and scientific productivity" Seminar Title: "Navel Gazing: Academic Inbreeding and Scientific Productivity"Abstract: The practice of having PhDs employed by the university that trained them, commonly called "academic inbreeding," has long been assumed to have a damaging effect on scholarly practices and achievement. Despite this perception, existing work on academic inbreeding is scarce and mostly descriptive or exploratory. Using data from Mexico, we find evidence that, first, academic inbreeding is associated with lower scholarly output. Second, academically inbred faculty are more centered in their own institution and less open to the rest of the scientific world. This navel gazing is a critical driver of their inferior scientific output when compared with non-inbreds. Third, we reveal that academic inbreeding practices can result from institutional strategies by which inbreds have higher teaching loads and perform more outreach activities to free up time of non-inbreds to be dedicated to the research endeavor. Thus, a small presence of inbreds can benefit the output of non-inbreds and potentially the whole university; but a dominant inbred environment will stifle productivity, even for non inbreds. Overall, our analysis suggests that administrators and policy makers in developing nations aiming to develop a thriving research environment in universities should consider mechanisms to limit this practice. |
| 5/1/09 |
Daniel Elfenbein, Ph.D. (Olin Business School) Paper: The Small Firm Effect and the Entrepreneurial Spawning of Scientists and Engineers" Seminar Title: "The Small Firm Effect and the Entrepreneurial Spawning of Scientist and Engineers"Abstract: We document and examine empirically a small firm effect on entrepreneurial spawning, using data from a broad sample of US scientists and engineers collected by the National Science Foundation. Scientists and engineers in small firms are far more likely than their large-firm counterparts to enter entrepreneurship. We identify four classes of explanations for this small firm effect-preference sorting, ability sorting, opportunity cost, and the possibility that workers in small firms develop entrepreneurial human capital-and explore these empirically, by examining the determinants of entrepreneurial entry and performance. We find that preference sorting plays a role in generating the small firm effect: small firms attract those with prior preferences for autonomy, who are similarly drawn into entrepreneurship. Similarly, ability sorting plays a role: small firms also attract some of the most talented scientists and engineers from larger firms, and high-ability workers are more likely to enter entrepreneurship, where their monetary rewards are highest. Finally, we interpret evidence that prior experience in small firms predicts positive performance outcomes in the early stages of entrepreneurship as suggesting that employment in a small firm also appears to make these workers better entrepreneurs. This effect may be largest among those of high ability. |
| 5/08/09 |
David Sinclair, Professor of Pathology (Harvard Medical School) HBS Case: "Sirtris Pharmaceuticals: Living Healthier, Longer" Paper One: "So what's the Scoop on that stuff in red wine that's supposed to let you live forever?" Paper Two: "Unlocking the Secrets of Longevity Genes" Seminar Title: "Sirtris Pharmaceuticals: drugs that extend healthy lifespan" Abstract: The quest to make a medicine that targets the aging process is considered by many to be just a dream. But breakthroughs in the science of aging mean that such a drug is feasible. The story of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals begins with the discovery of a molecule in red wine that extends lifespan and the partnership in 2004 between a professor at Harvard and a successful entrepreneur, Christoph Westphal. It is a lesson in raising capital from some unusual sources, the building of a successful biotech company, taking the company public when odds were against it, and negotiating an acquisition by Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) in 2008 for $720M. The story doesn't end there. GSK has committed another $200M to testing anti-aging drugs in clinical trials for diseases of aging such as diabetes and cancer. The results of these trials could determine whether there is lifespan extending drug approved by the FDA within our lifetimes. Either way, Sirtris serves as an example of how to turn a fundamental scientific discovery into a valuable business within record time. Sirtris Pharmaceuticals News & Publications Website The Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging Website (Harvard Medical School) |
| 5/15/09 |
Seminar Title: "Science in the former USSR" Lisa D. Cook, Ph.D., (Department of Economics and James Madison College, Michigan State University)
Paper: "Where Did All the Soviet Innovation Go? Evidence from Soviet and Russian Patents, 1963 to 2007." |