NSF Award
2431696
University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK) researchers from economics, business, and policy fields will collaborate with Launch Tennessee to uncover new insights about the timeline of innovation as well as the effect of public-private investments on innovation and innovators. The team will survey Tennessee innovators to assemble the Tennessee Longitudinal Survey of Ideas (TLSI). The TLSI will be different from other business surveys in one important way: A TLSI observation will be an idea rather than a firm or individual. This will allow researchers to focus on and track the process of innovation itself, along with characteristics of innovating firms. The TLSI will identify the amount of time that new ideas spend in different phases of innovation, such as conception, research and development, translation, patenting, marketization, or pivot/withdrawal. TLSI data and participants will support a second arm of the project, a mixed-methods evaluation of the public-private approach to investing in Tennessee innovators and communities. <br/><br/>The starting point for the TLSI sample will be Launch Tennessee’s expansive network of over 3,300 startups from its ten-year history, supplemented with additional contacts from UTK surveys of business leaders and the state database of registered business entities. Surveyed firms will identify some of their recent product and process developments and—in broad, unidentifiable terms—describe the nature and goals for each innovation as well as start and end dates for several potentially overlapping phases of development and deployment. Firms will be surveyed retrospectively, about innovations that are complete or withdrawn, as well as prospectively, about innovations in progress. A subset of surveyed firms will participate in follow-up interviews and case studies to add depth and meaning to TLSI data. Interviews will also contribute to a mixed-methods analysis of Launch Tennessee’s public-private model of startup support. Comparisons of firms in and outside of the Launch Tennessee network will describe the startup experience with and without centralized, place-based economic development. These qualitative insights will be paired with quantitative analyses of the association between Launch Tennessee support and economic outcomes at the firm and county levels. These interrelated projects complement UTK’s NSF-funded Regional Innovation Engines and the overarching TEAM TN body of work. Specifically, the TLSI will quantify the practical timeline and success rate for innovations in transportation, manufacturing, supply chain, and biotech, focal areas for TEAM TN. The Launch Tennessee evaluation will inform TEAM TN about the financial side of innovation by, for example, showing whether and when economic development investments in innovating firms leads to capital events and patenting. Both the TLSI and Launch TN evaluation will bring new data to open questions about access to funding and other resources for innovators from all communities.<br/><br/>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.
