Research Policy

The expansion of advanced technologies is intensifying demand for energy, materials, and efficiency of production systems, with semiconductors exemplifying the tension between rapid technological progress and resource sustainability, and the development of circular innovations. Yet it remains unclear whether circular innovations in this sector tend to be genuinely disruptive. This study examines …

Schumpeterian arguments of ''creative destruction'' predict that innovation is countercyclical. However, empirical findings demonstrate the contrary. We apply corporate finance principles to innovation economics and propose a ''hurdle-rate theory of inventive procyclicality.'' Macroeconomic episodes of high equity risk premia (ERP) stifle innovation in our sample of U.S. firms because many R&D pr…

Public procurement of innovation (PPI) is increasingly recognised as a powerful demand-side instrument for generating solutions to complex societal challenges. Yet realising this transformative potential requires innovations to scale beyond isolated implementation contexts. We contribute to the literature by bridging innovation scaling and market shaping perspectives to develop a novel conceptual…

Recent years have seen a reorganisation of innovation production to favour groups of collaborators, and increasingly specialised individual inventors. In this paper I construct a panel of highly prolific inventors, whom I observe frequently throughout their career. I develop a simple setting whereby inventors face a trade-off between acquiring knowledge depth and knowledge breadth. Empirically, I…

Firm innovation is strongly shaped by regional endowment – defined here as regional supply- and demand-side conditions for innovation – yet many regions are disadvantaged by having low levels of such endowment. While recent research increasingly emphasizes the role of regional soft factors , such as psychological openness, we still know relatively little about how such factors influence firm inno…

This paper investigates whether a causal, theory-driven decision framework, such as the Entrepreneurs-as-Scientists ( E -a-S) framework, influences how entrepreneurs reconfigure their entrepreneurial teams. We conducted a randomized controlled trial on 132 early-stage startups that participated in a pre-incubation program. During the pre-incubation program, we randomly assigned the early-stage st…

Amid accelerating socio-ecological crises—climate breakdown, mass extinctions and widening inequalities—there is an urgent need for transformative approaches that address root causes rather than symptoms. Disruptive sustainability seeks such transformations; however, it remains theoretically underdeveloped regarding how radically different knowledge systems can work together across the life-cycle…

Whilst it is well-known that research funding significantly shapes research landscapes, there is too little known about the processes that sit behind the funding opportunities — and specifically the publicly-shared funding call texts. The aim of this paper is therefore to investigate the processes experienced by EU funding professionals in authoring and operationalising funding call texts, to sur…

This paper investigates the relationship between international postdoctoral stays and academic career advancement among researchers returning to the Italian university system. Using a unique dataset of Italian PhD holders observed over a 30-year period, we analyze how international postdoctoral stays are associated with two key career outcomes: (i) the time between PhD completion and first appoin…