Doctoral Dissertation Research: Do Government Regulations Drive Product Features? The Case of the Global Commercial Drone Industry

本文以全球商用无人机/无人机产业为研究对象，提出了一种将政府科技监管与产品特征直接联系起来的新方法。该行业被选为全球多样化高科技市场的一个例子，在这个市场中，多种产品特性和参数是可能的。 这项工作的目的是了解哪些产品功能对无人机行业最重要，不同的标准如何影响它们，以及哪些功能对影响技术的安全性和轨迹最重要。这项工作与监管者和其他决策者有关，他们必须确定如何最好地在标准规范中取得平衡，以支持新兴市场，同时保护人们免受不受监管的技术的潜在危害。本文将使用网络抓取和其他档案分析来收集细粒度的产品特征数据，以揭示公司可获得的机构支持类型（例如，大学、公私营机构、科技园）以及它所生产的产品创新类型。我们还将研究政府标准对产品功能的影响，包括重量、身高、燃油里程和其他相关性能方面。除了具有精细的产品规格外，世界各国政府在使用何种监管标准方面也存在分歧。我们将研究美国和中国在飞行员执照和无人机注册的重量要求方面的差异，并调查这如何影响产品功能。总体而言，这项研究将提高我们对政府法规直接影响新兴市场企业产品特性的理解。该奖项反映了NSF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。

This dissertation research advances a novel way to link government science and technology regulation directly to product features by focusing on the global commercial drone/UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) industry. This industry was chosen as an example of a globally diverse high-tech market where multiple product features and parameters are possible. The intent of this work is to understand what product features are most crucial to the drone industry and how differing standards affect them, as well as what features are most crucial for affecting both the safety and trajectory of a technology. This work has relevance to regulators and other decision-makers who must ascertain how best to strike a balance in their standard specifications to support nascent markets while protecting people from the potential harms of unregulated technologies.This dissertation will use web scraping and other archival analyses to collect fine-grained product feature data to reveal the relationship between type of institutional support available to a firm (e.g., universities, public-private institutions, science parks) and the types of product innovations that it produces. We will also examine the impact of government standards on product features around weight, height, fuel mileage, and other relevant performance dimensions. Besides having granular product specifications, governments across the world have diverged as to what regulatory standards they use. We will examine differences between the U.S. and China around weight requirements for pilot licensing and drone registration and investigate how this affects product features. Overall, this research will improve our understanding of the effects of government regulations directly on the product features of firms in nascent markets.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.