Description:

LAURA PEDRAZA-FARIÑA
Law, Northwestern University

TITLE Scaffolding Innovation: Constructing Collaboration Across Knowledge Domains

Description: Traditional accounts of the role of patents and grants in fostering innovation justify these forms of governmental intervention as necessary to correct market failures. Patents, the standard argument goes, prevent free riding by copyists who did not invest in research and development. Similarly, grants to individual researchers, usually to conduct basic research, incentivize long-term socially beneficial activities for which there is no significant market demand. These two accounts, however, ignore the architecture of knowledge distribution. Scientific and technical knowledge is produced by communities of innovators rather than by lone scientists. These communities can be conceptualized as nodes in a knowledge network. Some communities have close ties with each other and frequently share information. Others, despite having complementary information needed to solve social problems, have few or no ties—they are separated by what sociologists call “structural holes.” This project focuses on the types of institutions and property rights (in the form of patents) that can support useful scientific communication, break down barriers, and help produce multidisciplinary inventions. Specifically, this research analyzes when and how the architecture of knowledge distribution erects barriers to knowledge acquisition, and how policy instruments such as patents and grants could be redesigned to bridge structural barriers to innovation. I will examine the emergence of cross-disciplinary collaboration in the “Interdisciplinary Research Program Consortia,” a NIH-initiative whose goal is to foster an inter-disciplinary, team science approach to research. NIH has funded nine interdisciplinary research consortia, whose foci range from the study of fertility preservation in female cancer patients to efforts to develop treatments for neurogenetic disorders. I propose that the NIH is attempting to build a “scientific scaffolding.” The term “scaffolding” denotes temporary bridges across communities of innovation, bridges that help seed and diffuse collaboration. I argue, first, that rather than serve only as incentives to invest in innovation, a subset of grants and patents can serve a scaffolding function that fosters collaboration across communities. Second, I hypothesize that scaffolding patents can produce particularly creative and high-impact innovations. If this is the case, adequately incentivizing the most socially-desirable innovations will require re-conceptualizing innovation incentives to include a scaffolding component.

Bio: Laura Pedraza Fariña joined the Northwestern faculty in 2013 as an Assistant Professor of Law. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Science in Human Culture Program at Northwestern. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her Ph.D. in genetics from Yale University. Her research interests include intellectual property, patent law, and international organizations. Her scholarship on intellectual property law uses the methodology of history and sociology of science and technology to analyze and inform the design of patent law. Her current projects include an analysis of the implications of sociological studies on tacit scientific knowledge for the disclosure theory of patent law, and a study of how the specialized court structure of patent law influences the content of patent decisions.

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