About

Context

 

Innovation is a crucial tool in searching for improved conditions for industry and society by fostering new products and services, production processes, and business models. Consequently, the literature on the economics of science and innovation has invested great effort in understanding the impact of public funding for research activities that strive to expand the scientific and technological frontier.

 

Research goals

 

The project aims to advance the discussion around how public funding for scientific research impacts the development of new innovative technologies. 

 

The research team’s main goal is to develop and test a methodology that allows matching patents to scientific publications, the latter of which stems from publicly funded research. We specifically focus on projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC) in the Life Sciences, Physical Science & Engineering and Social Science & Humanities sectors during the FP7 and H2020 Programmes. 

 

 

Methodological approach

 

The study methodology consisted of different phases. 

  1. Identify ERC-funded projects using the information provided by the ERC Executive Agency. 
  2. Identify the publications produced by these research projects using information reported in the Cordis and Scopus databases, complemented by information provided by the ERC databases. 
  3. Identify the patent applications that build on such ERC-funded research publications, using patent-to-publication citation information to reconstruct linkages between grants and citing patents. To this end, we used information reported in the NPL (Non-Patent Literature) field of patents using the Patstat database, provided by the European Patent Office.

 

 

Research lines

 

Based on the dataset developed, the team works along different research lines, integrating the starting database with additional datasources:

 

  1. Impact of government funding on frontier scientific research on technological development derived from science (Federico Munari, Herica Righi, Maurizio Sobrero, Laura Toschi, Elisa Leonardelli, Stefano Minini, Sara Tonelli).
  2. Gender differences in scientists' ability to inspire industrial applications, such as patents (Laura Toschi, Federico Munari, Angelo Di Iorio, Michele Pellegrini).
  3. Importance of the interdisciplinary nature of scientific research for innovation development (Laura Toschi, Federico Munari, Herica Morais Righi).
  4. Role of open science practices in supporting technological progress (Laura Toschi, Federico Munari, Angelo Di Iorio, Michele Pellegrini).
  5. Impact of projects based on the development or use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in respect to projects using traditional methodologies (Federico Munari, Raffaele Mancuso, Laura Toschi).