Too big to innovate? Exploring organizational size and innovation processes in scientific research

Jonathon Mote, Gretchen Jordan, Jerald Hage, Wilbur Hadden and Aleia Clark

Science and Public Policy, 2016, vol. 43, issue 3, 332-337

Abstract: We explore the impact of organizational size in six federally funded research organizations on a range of organizational processes related to the pursuit of innovation. The data utilized consisted of 266 scientists drawn from 64 research projects across five programmatic research areas: alternative energies, biology, chemistry, geophysical sciences, and material sciences. A sixth project category was added to accommodate the highly interdisciplinary character of a handful of projects. Although the data had some limitations, it was found that organizational size had a negative impact on three categories of innovation processes: the amount of time spent in research and professional activities, how research time is spent, and exchanges of technical knowledge. In addition, some potential advantages of larger size, such as: greater research resources, better perceived managerial quality or a visionary strategy, were not found to be significant.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/scipol/scv045 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:scippl:v:43:y:2016:i:3:p:332-337.

Access Statistics for this article

Science and Public Policy is currently edited by Nicoletta Corrocher, Jeong-Dong Lee, Mireille Matt and Nicholas Vonortas

More articles in Science and Public Policy from Oxford University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().