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History of the Center |
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The Center for Innovation was founded in 1982 when the Division of Engineering Sciences approached Jerald Hage to return to the study of organizational innovation. With a new assistant professor, Frank Hull, and with the cooperation of the industrial psychology program and the management program in the R. H. Smith School of Business, the Center was founded to study innovation in industrial organizations, primarily in the US but also in Japan. One of the main foci of interest was the problem of the adoption of flexible manufacturing. For the next eight years, the Center produced several dissertations, a number of papers and a book from a conference it held on the Futures of Organizations. Starting in 1990 and for the next year eight years, the focus shifted to the study of the diversity of human capital and its consequences for economic growth. This line of research was at the nation state level and exploited a large data set that had been developed by Hage during the 1970s and 1980s on Britain, France, Germany and Italy during the period of 1870 through 1970. This research was conducted jointly with Maurice Garnier at Indiana University. The research program was funded by several grants from the National Science Foundation and the French government. Again, a number of papers were published, dissertations defined and a major report on technical education was written for the Department of Education in the US. A technique for measuring the social efficiency of the education system by measuring the costs and benefits of investing in technical and scientific education was developed for the Ministry of Planning in France. At the conclusion of this eight year period and these macro studies, the Center again shifted focus back to research on organizational innovation with several important differences. First, an emphasis was placed on scientific innovation in a major comparative study of radical innovation in biomedicine in France, Germany, Britain, and the US, jointly conducted with J. Rogers Hollingsworth. Second, the approach was multi-level, that is micro or the laboratory, meso or the research organization, and macro or the institutional arrangements of science. This research program was funded by the Swedish government and the National Science Foundation. Again, several papers were published by Jerald Hage and Jonathon Mote on the Institut Pasteur. Since the beginning of the millennium, the Center has built upon these interests by holding conferences to develop a book on new research agendas in innovation, science, knowledge trajectories, and institutional change and their interrelationships, supported by a grant from the Department of Energy. The Center was actively engaged for eight years in helping Gretchen Jordan from Sandia National Laboratories, employ her research environment survey and developing evaluation tools and techniques for the evaluation of science and technology under a grant from Basic Energy Sciences of the Department of Energy. With this support, the Center for Innovation was able to add Jonathan Mote, an expert in network analysis, who stayed with the Center for five years before moving to a business school. For the past six years, first with Jonathan Mote and second with Jeffrey Lucas, the Center has been conducting applied research with the same objective in the STAR division of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. With the help of both Gretchen Jordan and Jonathan Mote, the Center has received two National Science Foundation grants in the new program to build the science of science and innovation policy. This on-going research is examining five national research laboratories and measuring technical progress in real time at the National Institutes of Health. Jonathan Mote continues to work on the former grant whereas Wilbur Hadden, with his expertise in health inequality and medical research, is involved in the latter grant. In addition to a number of project reports, the Center has been publishing papers and regularly presenting papers at conferences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Evaluation Association, the American Sociological Association, the annual conference on science and technology at Georgia Tech University as well as elsewhere. The addition of Wilbur Hadden has allowed the Center to move beyond its focus on public and private research, business organizations, and economic growth to a new sector of society, namely the health care system. Given the current institutional crisis in health care, the Center is concerned with developing new ideas about how to reduce health care costs, mortality, and improve the equality of health care. In particular, the Center would like to conduct experiments in how these objectives might be achieved, particular with the creation of a robust theory about how to form social networks between individuals and between organizations and rebuild the social capital of communities, a fundamental problem recognized by Putman (2000) in his book Bowling Alone. In the future, the Center hopes to continue a build the theory of science and innovation policy and synthesize this with the work of others. As part of this effort, Hage is delivering talks about this new paradigm at various universities (University of California-Riverside, Emory, Pennsylvania) so that he can receive criticisms from various people about errors in logic or in evidence. An important part of this new paradigm involves rewriting a number of major theories in neo-classical economics and up-dating the theories of the sociological masters. A major consideration remains the improvement in the tools and techniques for evaluating science and technology policy. |
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