Ivory Tower Universities and Competitive Business Firms

Details Ivory Tower Universities and Competitive Business Firms Ivory Tower Universities and Competitive Business Firms

1999-06-16

arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9906229v1

Nature, 400 (1999) 433.

Physics

Condensed Matter

Statistical Mechanics

5 pages in multicolumn LaTeX format with 11 eps figures. To appear in Nature

Scientific paper

There is nowadays considerable interest on ways to quantify the dynamics of research activities, in part due to recent changes in research and development (R&D) funding. Here, we seek to quantify and analyze university research activities, and compare their growth dynamics with those of business firms. Specifically, we analyze five distinct databases, the largest of which is a National Science Foundation database of the R&D expenditures for science and engineering of 719 United States (US) universities for the 17-year period 1979--1995. We find that the distribution of growth rates displays a ``universal'' form that does not depend on the size of the university or on the measure of size used, and that the width of this distribution decays with size as a power law. Our findings are quantitatively similar to those independently uncovered for business firms, and consistent with the hypothesis that the growth dynamics of complex organizations may be governed by universal mechanisms.

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