New Things Under the Sun

Nov 24 2024 63 ep. 23 mins 38
New Things Under the Sun Podcast artwork

Synthesizing academic research about innovation, science, and creativity.

  Science  Technology
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Training Scientists in Low and Middle Income Countries

Nov 24 2024 19 mins  
New Things Under the Sun is once again putting together a list of dissertation papers related to innovation. If you want your paper to be included, email the title, an abstract, and a link to the paper, to [email protected] by the end of November.In this post, coauthored with Caroline Fry, we look at the evidence on the effects of training programs for scientists in low

The Decline in Writing About Progress

Aug 14 2024 26 mins  
The frequency of words associated with "progress" in English, German, and French books rose during the era of industrialization, but is down since the 1950s, at least according to google. Is this a signal of declining cultural interest in progress, as a concept? Or just an artifact of how google constructed its text corpus?This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial versi

Incentives to Invent at Universities

Aug 14 2024 19 mins  
Prior to the 2000s, many European countries practiced something called “the professor’s privilege” wherein university professors retained patent rights to inventions they made while employed at the university. This was a “privilege” because the norm is for patent ownership to be assigned to the organization that employs an inventor; professors were an exception to this no

Twitter and the Spread of Academic Knowledge

Jun 20 2024 22 mins  
A classic topic in the study of innovation is the link between physical proximity and the exchange of ideas. But I’ve long been interested in a relatively new kind of serendipity engine, which isn’t constrained by physical proximity: Twitter. Lots of academics use twitter to talk about new discoveries and research. Today I want to look at whether twitter serves as a novel kind

When the Robots Take Your Job

Jun 03 2024 39 mins  
Note:Economists typically think that labor and capital are complementary - more of the one makes the other more productive. But there’s a flourishing literature that looks at the consequences of capital that replaces, rather than augments, human workers. In this post, I want to talk about a very simple equation that is inspired by the ideas in these papers, and which I think is a

Can We Learn About Innovation From Patent Data?

Apr 03 2024 26 mins  
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between

Do studies based on patents get different results?

Apr 02 2024 16 mins  
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between

Patents (weakly) predict innovation

Apr 01 2024 16 mins  
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between

How many inventions are patented?

Mar 31 2024 24 mins  
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between

Training enhances the value of new technology

Mar 21 2024 16 mins  
Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past few centuries, but much of that progress is still limited to the richest countries. Why don't new technologies spread quickly throughout the world, benefiting billions of people? In this podcast, we’ll focus on one particular answer: new technologies improve productivity, but they improve productivity more when paired with k