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

新冠肺炎是第一次在全球范围内扰乱人与人之间互动的重大疫情，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在研发上投入数十亿美元，以创造新的发明，并开发新的能力和战略来解决当代问题。新冠肺炎的大流行代表着对发明过程的挑战，此前从未发生过经济危机。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，不仅是公司和组织内的工人之间的互动，而且是与客户、竞争对手、供应链合作伙伴和服务提供商之间的互动。该项目量化了新冠肺炎疾病传播缓解战略对隐性知识交流的影响，以及对美国发明率的影响。该项目将通过构建用于实时调查的新数据集来量化限制人类交互的影响程度，并确定对变化更具弹性的发明者和领域特征。此外，这项工作将比较各国的战略，看看在发明和专利申请率方面是否有不同的结果。这项工作是新颖的，从传统的USTPO数据集转移到一个时间序列仪表盘，分析专利只有30天的滞后(而不是传统的18个月的滞后)。这项工作将分析企业的规模，以检查国家战略是否影响了不同类型的企业的专利能力。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，显著降低我们的创新能力的政策将影响经济的结果。了解政策如何在保护创新的同时减缓疾病的传播，对于继续管理这一大流行病和未来的危机将是重要的。这项工作将为创新理论，特别是创新韧性的概念提供信息，并将在线提供给研究社区、政策制定者和公众。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.