Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 11

Further issues surround the effort innovators apply as they respond to the incentives
science policy imposes. Evaluation methods that privilege narrow ideas or poorly evaluate broad
ideas will constrain ideas with broad impact and direct effort away from work that crosses
evaluative boundaries. Grant-giving agencies and tenure systems that privilege narrowness will
produce narrowness. Meanwhile, major research prizes, such as the Nobel Prize and the Fields
Medal,,remain oriented toward individual accomplishments, which might have been consistent
with early 20^th Century science but appear increasingly inconsistent with 21^st Century science.
Individual-oriented rewards encourage individual work and can foment credit conflicts, acting to
dissuade teamwork and disrupt team function, even as teamwork has come to dominate science
and become the typical locus of high impact ideas.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II reviews a range of empirical
evidence, showing that the role of the individual in science has changed dramatically in line with
the ‘burden of knowledge’ mechanism. Section III considers core roles of science policy, laying
the foundation for further analysis. Section IV considers the implications of declining innovative
outputs by younger scholars for science policy. Section V considers the implications of the shift
to teamwork for science policy. Section VI concludes.

II. The Evolution of Science

This section documents two central dynamics in science. First, innovators have become
increasingly unlikely to produce key ideas at younger ages. Second, innovators have become
more specialized with time and increasingly work in teams. This section summarizes this
evidence and shows that these dynamics follow naturally if knowledge accumulates as science
advances.

A. Life-Cycle Productivity in Science

As foundational knowledge expands, innovators may naturally extend their training
phases, resulting in a delayed start to the active innovative career. Such a delay may be
particularly consequential if raw innovative potential is greatest when young. This section
summarizes evidence of this pattern over the 20^th century, demonstrating a major dynamic in
science: a sharp decline in the innovative output in the early life-cycle.

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