The burden of knowledge and the 'death of the renaissance man'
Subtitle: is innovation getting harder?
By: Benjamin F. Jones.
Contributors: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series ;; working paper 11360; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;; working paper no. 11360.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Subjects: Technological innovations -- Economic aspects -- History.; Economic development -- History.
Description: "This paper investigates, theoretically and empirically, a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress.  If knowledge accumulates as technology progresses, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden.  Innovators can compensate in their education by seeking narrower expertise, but narrowing expertise will reduce their individual capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity - a greater reliance on teamwork - and negative implications for growth.  I develop a formal model of this "knowledge burden mechanism" and derive six testable predictions for innovators.  Over time, educational attainment will rise while increased specialization and teamwork follow from a sufficiently rapid increase in the burden of knowledge.  In cross-section, the model predicts that specialization and teamwork will be greater in deeper areas of knowledge while, surprisingly, educational attainment will not vary across fields.  I test these six predictions using a micro-data set of individual inventors and find evidence consistent with each prediction.  The model thus provides a parsimonious explanation for a range of empirical patterns of inventive activity.  Upward trends in academic collaboration and lengthening doctorates, which have been noted in other research, can also be explained by the model, as can much-debated trends relating productivity growth and patent output to aggregate inventive effort.  The knowledge burden mechanism suggests that the nature of innovation is changing, with negative implications for long-run economic growth"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Also available in print.
Includes bibliographical references.
Title from PDF file as viewed on 7/5/2005.
System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.