Credit: Nick Romanenko

Carl Pray of School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, left, and Clinton Andrews of the Bloustein School have joined forces to lead a multidisciplinary discussion on factors that constrain or promote innovation and policies that encourage it.

Innovation is the spark that animates the world’s great artists and inventors, as well as the financiers who back them. But to an eclectic group of Rutgers researchers, it is not just history’s pivotal inventions, but the circumstances and policies that give rise to them that merit urgent scholarly attention.

Wide-ranging interest in the study of innovation, cutting across departmental and school boundaries, has taken shape this year in the Rutgers Innovation Studies Initiative. An initial series of lectures this past fall on subjects ranging from global warming to the biotechnology industry to new energy systems, drew historians, planners, economists, engineers, biologists, and business and labor specialists, among others, to Rutgers’ campuses.

This semester’s series will begin with a symposium next week on the creation of bioscience clusters to foster partnerships among government, academic, and private sector groups focused on medical and pharmaceutical research and development. Andrew Munk, the international relations director for the Danish-Swedish Medicon Valley Alliance, a bioscience hot spot, will be among the speakers.

How do innovations fit into the economy of the times? What are the social circumstances? Does public policy have anything to do with them? These questions have assumed growing importance as policymakers grapple with global challenges, such as climate change, drought, and pandemics, the group’s founders say. In addition to advancing research into the social, cultural, and political factors that constrain or promote innovation, the group also expects to identify policies to encourage it.

“There are times when innovation flourishes,” said Clinton Andrews, an associate professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, and a prime mover behind the initiative. “Like crime, it involves motive and opportunity. Throughout history, do some general patterns emerge?”

Andrews believes that incremental improvements in technology will not be enough to solve the scale of today’s problems. “We need to do something more dramatic, including promoting the sort of research and development tax credits that encourage game-changing technologies,” said Andrews, an engineer-turned-planner who focuses on environmental and energy policy. In addition, government investment needs to be much smarter. “We’re spending too much money solving yesterday’s problems,” he added, citing coal research as an example. “We’re squandering research dollars to just get the sulfur – and not the carbon – out.’’

The lecture series began on a retrospective note last fall with a talk by Paul Israel, managing editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers, on Edison’s journey from churning out piecemeal inventions in the telegraph industry to his transformative innovations in electrical power delivery. In November, Boston University economist Iain Cockburn jumped back to the present in re-examining what some analysts believe is a recent, sharp decline in productivity in the pharmaceutical sector. In the final talk of the semester, Yale systems analyst Arnulf Grubler discussed the slow pace of major technological transitions.

On Feburary 11, Munk will be joined by David Finegold, dean of the School of Management and Labor Relations, and Michelle Gittelman, a Rutgers business professor, at the symposium on bioscience clusters, beginning at noon at the Labor Education Center auditorium in New Brunswick. Munk’s Scandinavian organization is now extending its reach to bioscience clusters around the globe, from Asia to North America to other regions in Europe, to promote the exchange of knowledge and staff. Finegold and Gittelman will discuss the American experience, including the role of the federal government, in creating partnerships between private-sector companies and universities, and in developing high-skill “ecosystems” in regions throughout the United States.

A symposium at the end of March will examine models for converting university research on technology into commercial applications. It will be followed in April by a forum exploring innovation and development trends in the pharmaceutical, agricultural and environmental, and communications technology industries in New Jersey and South Asia.

“We don’t know why some areas are more innovative, but it’s instructive to focus on the moment of innovation,” said Carl Pray, a professor of agriculture, food, and resource economics at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS), who also is one of the group’s founders. “We want to get people with different perspectives to try to understand the process better.’’

Several years ago, Pray, who was teaching at what was then called Cook College, discovered that Andrews, a colleague located several miles away on a different campus, shared his interest in science policy and its impact on technological innovation. The two talked about joining forces on a research project, but later decided to open it up when they realized that scholars in other disciplines, including Michael Geselowitz, a historian of technology and the staff director of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Inc. History Center; Finegold[and Israel, among others, were interested in innovation more broadly.

Pray, a former Peace Corps worker who studies the efficacy of public sector investment in agricultural research in the developing world, said he and Andrews are now developing a joint research project comparing innovations in bio-fuels – an alternative energy source – agricultural biotechnology, and green building design. He added he also could see the benefits of an even wider collaboration.

“The reason to go beyond science and technology policy is that we thought it also would be interesting to include the people who study the process by which companies and government research institutions develop new products,” said Pray, who recently won a Rockefeller Foundation grant to work with economists in India and China to evaluate the success of research on drought-tolerant rice.

Forming another link, Andrew Toole, an assistant professor of agricultural, food, and resource economics at SEBS, is examining the paths by which new technologies move from university laboratories to commercial applications in the medical biotechnology field. He is helping to develop the symposium on university technology transfer.

The initiative’s founders say they have purposely held the lectures at different locations on Rutgers’ campuses in order to create momentum for the project and to build community. Andrews said the group will likely strengthen these bonds by putting together a certificate program for students interested in innovation studies, encompassing courses in several departments.