NSF Award
2420245
University research labs play an important role in strengthening U.S. innovation, global competitiveness, and economic growth by making transformative scientific discoveries and training the scientific and engineering workforce. In addition to research and training, academic research labs are also involved in activities found in the typical business organization, from hiring workers and delegating tasks to making capital investments and creating shared goals. These activities are recorded in the form of administrative expenditures and other organizational archives that have the potential to advance understanding of how the organization of academic research labs relates to scientific productivity, innovation, and impact. This project uses expenditure and research records to better understand how data that are localized and readily available to universities can be used to study academic research labs and develop improved metrics for benchmarking, policy development, and communication to public constituents. <br/><br/>This project applies theories of organizational formation and performance to academic research labs and uses a multi-level research design at the individual, lab, and university levels to investigate the organizational character of scientific productivity in three interrelated stages. First, this project combines large-scale administrative archives with machine learning and inferential statistics to develop a novel computational approach for characterizing the organizational models that underlie the operation of academic research labs. In this step, the project demonstrates a strategy and means of leveraging administrative records to construct theory-driven and empirically instantiated organizational models expressed across a variety of academic research labs. Second, this project extends its focus to the longitudinal operation of academic research labs to examine the extent to which lab models persist or change over time and evaluate whether and how academic research labs differ from organizations in the private sector. Third, much like studies of scientific production based on individuals and collaborative teams, this project links labs to their research products to operationalize the same ideas of scientific productivity, impact, and innovation in an organizational context.<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.
