How to Share A Really Good Secret: Managing Sharing/Secrecy Tensions Around Scientific Knowledge Disclosure

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Nelson, Andrew J.
• 署名单位: University of Oregon
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2015.1040
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 265-285
• 关键词: industrial science; academic science; disclosure and sharing; publishing and patenting; biotechnology; digital audio

摘要

The diffusion of scientific knowledge is critical for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Yet scientists face a fundamental dilemma when it comes to sharing such knowledge: sharing can simultaneously advance and challenge both academic and commercial interests. Although several studies explore the different reasons that scientists may or may not share, along with their overall propensity to do so, we have much less insight into how researchers who confront sharing/secrecy tensions attempt to manage them. In turn, our understanding of the ways in which scientists enable cumulative innovation through sharing, even as they attend to their private interests, remains limited. Based on qualitative analysis of 46 interviews and 58 oral histories with researchers in biotechnology and digital audio, I identify 4 tactics that researchers use to manage sharing/secrecy tensions-leveraging trust, strategic withholding, delaying, and patenting-and I analyze how the use of these tactics is tied to particular sharing practices, organizational environments (e.g., universities versus firms), and scientific fields. I then theorize how these tactics address different dimensions of sharing/secrecy tensions, working together as part of an integrated repertoire. Finally, I tie my findings to broader considerations around sharing, including managerial and policy initiatives aimed at promoting cumulative innovation.