The Rise of Absorptive Research in Corporate America: 1945-1980
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study the post-World War II "Golden Age" of American corporate research from 1945 to 1980, using multiple indicators of corporate research activity.We use an ensemble learning approach to classify firms as either Science Leaders, Absorbers or Followers.Our analysis reveals that only a small fraction of firms, whom we call Leaders, invest in internal research that is on the scientific frontier, with the objective to generate breakthrough inventions.Absorbers invest in research principally to absorb external scientific discoveries to fuel their inventive activity.Followers typically generate incremental innovations, using older scientific knowledge.Consistent with this, we find Leaders were more likely to be at the technological frontier, enjoy greater market power, and benefit from government procurement contracts.As universities and startups began to commercialize academic discoveries, the need for "absorptive corporate labs" declined.The shift ultimately transformed the American innovation landscape, deepening the division of innovative labor between universities, startups, and incumbent corporations, with only a select group of Leader firms continuing to invest in basic science.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".