Using Human Resource Data to Track Innovation Summary of a Workshop (2002) / Chapter Skim
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1. What Role for Human Resource Data in Tracking Information?
1. What Role for Human Resource Data in Tracking Information?
Pages 3-10
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From page 3... ...
Ultimately, we want to use that understanding to adjust public policies to stimulate innovation and influence its direction to improve public health, enhance national security, and protect the environment as well as to foster economic development. Although it is a long way from a better understanding of the characteristics of innovation and how they are changing to policy prescriptions, measures informed by this understanding could take a variety of forms increased public investment in research and training of scientists and engineers in particular fields, modifications of regulations that impede innovation, or adjustments to tax rates or intellectual property policies.
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From page 4... ...
At no time has that been more apparent than in recent years. At the workshop Paula Stephan, in introducing her commissioned paper, described several changes that are widely assumed to be occurring rapidly, to be substantial, and to have significant consequences for economic performance in the short term or in the longer run.
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As firms continue to outsource many of their innovation-related activities and work closely with universities and other public and private institutions, successful innovation appears to depend increasingly on geographically clustered networks of related organizations. Regions such as Silicon Valley, Research Triangle Park, and Austin, Texas prosper while regions lacking key infrastructure may experience economic stagnation.
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From page 6... ...
In the conceptual scheme outlined above, R&D represent innovative effort and an important influence on whether new products and services and processes are developed and commercialized; but they are not a substitute for direct measures of innovation. Paula Stephan and other workshop participants observed that the most commonly cited R&D data, from the National Science Foundation's Industrial Research and Development (RD-1)
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· Location. The industrial R&D survey includes private and foreignowned as well as publicly held companies but covers activities carried out in the United States only.
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CATEGORIES OF DATA The workshop elaborated the following typology of professional characteristics primarily relevant to the science and engineering workforce that might have a bearing on innovation and on which survey data are or could be collected: T
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An examination of the roles of scientists and engineers in service sector firms would in all likelihood confirm that to a large extent innovative activity in that sector entails applications of information technology to customer service, marketing, inventory, and logistics rather than activities represented by standard R&D data. Similarly, the role of scientists, many of them academics, in forming and advising new firms has been critical to the emergence of industrial biotechnology and illustrates its close connections to publicly funded fundamental research.
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From page 10... ...
But much work remains to be done on the effects of service sector innovation and in distinguishing types of technologies with different workforce efforts, developing better measures of skill than educational level, and addressing intervening variables such as organizational and human resource management changes. HUMAN RESOURCE DATA IN EVALUATING GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE Workshop participants also observed that data on professionals' career paths and productivity can supplement other means of evaluating government research and education programs.
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