RAPID: Tacit Knowledge Transfer and COVID-19 Impacts on US Invention

COVID-19是第一次在全球范围内破坏人与人之间互动的重大流行病，但不太可能是最后一次。美国政府、世界各地的公司和组织每年投入数十亿美元用于研究和开发，以创造新的发明，发展新的能力和战略来解决当代问题。2019冠状病毒病大流行对发明过程构成了前所未有的挑战。发明对于维持一个国家的经济以及开发解决问题和管理危机的工具至关重要。知识创造和发明的行为是以人与人之间的互动为前提的，这种互动不仅存在于公司和组织内部的员工之间，还存在于客户、竞争对手、供应链合作伙伴和服务提供商之间。该项目量化了COVID-19疾病传播减缓战略对隐性知识交流的影响以及对美国发明率的影响。该项目将通过构建实时调查的新数据集来量化人类互动的影响程度，并确定更具变化弹性的发明者和领域特征。此外，这项工作将比较国家战略，看看在发明和专利申请率方面是否有不同的结果。这项工作的新颖之处在于，它将传统的美国专利局数据集转移到一个时间序列仪表板上，该仪表板仅用30天的滞后时间（而不是传统的18个月的滞后时间）来分析专利。这项工作将分析企业的规模，以检验国家战略是否影响了不同类型企业的专利能力。这项工作将使我们了解危机政策对发明的影响。发明对经济至关重要；因此，大大降低我们创新能力的政策将影响经济的结果。了解政策在保护创新的同时减轻疾病传播的方式，对于持续管理大流行和未来的危机非常重要。这项工作将为创新理论，特别是创新弹性的概念提供信息，并将在网上提供给研究界、政策制定者和公众。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

COVID-19 is the first major pandemic to disrupt person-to-person interactions on a global scale, but it is unlikely to be the last. The U.S. government, firms and organizations around the world invest billions of dollars every year on research and development to create novel inventions and develop new capabilities and strategies to address contemporary problems. The COVID-19 pandemic represents a challenge to the process of invention that no previous economic crisis imposed. Invention is critical for sustaining a nation’s economy and for developing the tools to solve problems and manage crises. The act of knowledge creation and invention is premised upon person-to-person interactions, and not only between workers within firms and organizations, but with customers, competitors, supply chain partners, and service providers. The project quantifies the effects of COVID-19 disease transmission mitigation strategies on tacit knowledge exchange and impacts on US invention rates. The project will quantify the extent of impact that constraints on human interaction by constructing a new data set for real-time investigation and identify inventor and domain characteristics that are more resilient to change. Furthermore, the work will compare national strategies to see if there are different outcomes for invention and patent application rates. The work is novel from moving from the traditional USTPO dataset to a time series dashboard that analyzes patents with only a 30-day lag (rather than the traditional 18-month lag). The work will analyze the size of the businesses to examine whether national strategies have affected different types of businesses abilities to patent. The work will inform our understanding of the consequences of crisis policies on invention. Invention is essential for the economy; therefore, policies that significantly decrease our ability to innovate will affect the outcome on the economy. Understanding the ways in which policies can protect innovation while mitigating the spread of disease will be important for the continual management of the pandemic and future crises. This work will inform the theory of innovation and particularly the notion of innovation resilience and will be made available online for the research community, policy makers, and the public.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.