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Matt Clancy
Research Fellow
Creator of New Things Under the Sun, a living literature review on social science research about innovation. Research fellow at Open Philanthropy.
Published: Nov 24, 2021
Into the weeds
Published: Sep 07, 2021
Science is particularly useful for inventions in unfamiliar or difficult knowledge domains
Published: Dec 20, 2021
Evidence on how life experiences influence research choices
Published: Oct 11, 2021
Some of the forces blocking really new ideas in research
Published: Feb 24, 2021
Knowledge that is different - but not too different - tends to be most useful for innovation.
Published: Feb 28, 2021
Physical proximity is more important for meeting new people (with new knowledge) than for collaboration
Published: Mar 01, 2021
Access to libraries boosts local patent rates; access to wikipedia shapes science
Published: Mar 04, 2021
Why a tight correlation between cumulative experience and declining costs doesn't really prove anything.
Published: Mar 04, 2021
Better than standard evidence for the existence of learning curves, as well as why they are less useful than hoped
Published: Mar 22, 2021
Natural experiments in the extent of science show predictable effects on technology that relies on science
Published: Apr 10, 2021
If patents in one tech class cite another, a surge in patenting in the cited class forecasts patenting in the citing one
Published: Apr 13, 2021
Technologies directly dependent on science are atypical, but they may have indirect impacts on most technologies
Published: Apr 18, 2021
Cities as a platform to remix knowledge
Published: Aug 10, 2021
Incentives to publish fast are in tension with careful science
Published: May 13, 2021
Patents make citations to other patents, but that doesn't always mean engagement with the cited patent's ideas
Published: May 22, 2021
Quasi-experimental evidence on the effectiveness of giving R&D grants to small businesses
Published: May 26, 2021
They are usually more than half the point of R&D
Published: Jun 03, 2021
Several strands of evidence on the size of publication bias
Published: Jun 08, 2021
Some evidence that science does self-correct
Published: Jun 18, 2021
Taking a stab at some psychohistory
Published: Jun 10, 2021
Physical sciences seem to have less issues - is that due to empirical tools, theory, or both?
Published: Jun 29, 2021
The challenge of building outlets to host research that can't be published in top journals
Published: Jun 11, 2021
Evidence from patents and papers
Published: Jun 17, 2021
Micro and macro evidence on the productivity of R&D over time
Published: Jun 11, 2021
When you give multiple teams of researchers the same question and data, it's not uncommon to get different results
Published: Jun 22, 2021
How easier long-distance communication erodes local knowledge spillovers
Published: Jun 10, 2021
Cheaper travel is one reason local knowledge spillovers are declining
Published: Jun 23, 2021
If ideas comes from brains, maybe more brains means more innovation
Published: Jun 23, 2021
Filmmaking is a technology too, and like other technologies it gets better
Published: Jun 26, 2021
Some evidence the scientific incentive system works
Published: Jul 14, 2021
Why remote collaboration is becoming so common in academia, and what we can learn from it
Published: Jul 16, 2021
Evidence that academic conferences facilitate subsequent collaborations between attendees
Published: Jul 27, 2021
In medicine, applied research and development responds strongly to profit signals, more basic research not so much
Published: Aug 05, 2021
Exposure to entrepreneurs (mostly) encourages entrepreneurship
Published: Aug 13, 2021
Evidence that this idea spreads best from people in a similar social position, and that you can only get the idea once
Published: Aug 20, 2021
Some theory on how academia changes itself, with an illustration from economics
Published: Aug 10, 2021
More researchers per innovation, because you need more knowledge to solve frontier problems
Published: Aug 10, 2021
The knowledge immigrants bring with them takes root in receiving countries
Published: Aug 13, 2021
20 years is a good rule of thumb
Published: Feb 09, 2022
Why does patenting yesterday predict patenting today?
Published: Feb 24, 2022
Evidence that emissions standards and high fuel prices boost clean innovation in cars
Published: Mar 10, 2022
Do the same mechanisms that create complex life also create complex technology?
Published: Apr 15, 2022
Evidence from Three Global Crises
Published: May 31, 2022
Evidence that discoveries are getting smaller on average
Published: Jun 21, 2022
Relatively common for ideas we know will be big, but not so much for the rest
Published: Jul 01, 2022
Yes, but with some serious caveats
Published: Aug 17, 2022
Very close physical proximity helps people discover each other, if they wouldn't otherwise
Published: Sep 06, 2022
Growth theory in the shadow of artificial general intelligence
Published: Feb 13, 2023
A guide to the functioning of the modern scientific ecosystem, excluding issues related to publication bias
Published: Oct 18, 2022
Remote teams have traditionally been bad at breakthrough innovation, but things may have changed
Published: Dec 17, 2022
Average impact falls but the hits keep coming
Published: Jan 04, 2023
New ideas vs deep expertise; conceptual vs experimental innovation
Published: Feb 13, 2023
A guide to articles about how place affects innovation
Published: Feb 13, 2023
A guide to how how innovation has changed over time
Published: Feb 14, 2023
A guide to articles about various models of innovation, and evidence related to their utility.
Published: Feb 14, 2023
A guide to posts related to methodological questions in the study of innovation.
Published: Feb 14, 2023
A guide to the kinds of characteristics correlated with innovative people, groups, and organizations.
Published: Mar 08, 2023
A guide to some of the articles here that don't quite fit into other categories (yet)
Published: Jan 31, 2023
Big impacts for people who move to countries where science is happening
Published: Feb 25, 2023
Evidence that local interaction leads to deeper engagement with new ideas
Published: Feb 13, 2023
🎧 On living literature reviews, disruptions in citations, and creating a narrative (1 hour with transcript).
Published: Mar 31, 2023
What if risk aversion is a lot of little biases that add up?
Published: Apr 22, 2023
Suggestive evidence says yes, but we need to know more
Published: May 16, 2023
Models of economic growth where sometimes technology gets you killed
AD
Published: Jun 02, 2023
Big firms do things differently
Published: Jul 12, 2023
Raise the cost of research, or reduce the rewards of it
AD
Published: Aug 23, 2023
A reason large firms conduct R&D at the same rate as small ones, despite (apparently) lower R&D productivity
CF
Published: Nov 17, 2023
Limits to the universality of new discoveries
Published: Dec 15, 2023
Disentangling selection and training
Published: Feb 17, 2024
Boosting innovation by teaching people to be tech entrepreneurs?
KT
Published: Mar 20, 2024
One reason technology doesn't diffuse more quickly - you need to know how to use it well
Published: Mar 29, 2024
Correlations between patents and other innovation proxies
Published: Mar 29, 2024
For the sample on New Things Under the Sun, not really
Published: Mar 29, 2024
The definitive New Things Under the Sun post.
Published: May 02, 2024
Transmission of innovative taste?
Published: Jun 03, 2024
Some Intuitions From Recent Models of Automation
Published: Jun 07, 2024
A collection of the more far out articles on New Things
Published: Jun 19, 2024
Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.
Published: Aug 15, 2024
The rise and fall of our interest in progress?
