Assistant Professor at DIG, Politecnico di Milano

Office 3.05

Telephone +39-02-2399 (4823)    Email chiara[dot]franzoni[at]polimi[dot]it

Areas of specialization innovation, science, high-skill immigration, crowdsourcing.

Executive teaching Intellectual Property Rights; patent intelligence; high-tech start-ups; forecasting the adoption of radically new products

Current Projects

Global Science (GlobSci) (with G. Scellato and P. Stephan). We aim to gain understanding on the international mobility of scientists, their networking and their team composition. We conducted a large survey during 2011 that resulted in more than 19 thousand answers from scientists in 16 countries and 4 fields of science.  At the present time it represents the most comprehensive survey of international mobility that exists. An article presenting the composition of the research-active population in the 16 countries is published in Nature Biotechnology (December 2012). In a second paper presented at the Fall Appam Meeting (October 2012) we show that mobile scientists are more inclined to establish international networks. Their networks are also larger and more successful than those of non-mobile scientists. Evidence on the competition of countries to attract international PhD and post-doc students has been presented at the NBER Workshop on High Skill Immigration (October 2012). In a forth paper presented at the OECD Conference on High-Skill Immigration (December 2012) we find robust evidence that both the foreign-born and the returnees perform at a higher level compared to the non-mobile natives. See press coverage on GlobSci below on this page.

Crowd Science (with H. Sauermann). This is a new way to organize scientific projects that employs the work of volunteers (citizen scientists, gamers, hobbyists) and involves the open disclosure of logs and intermediate knowledge that normally would beinvisible outside the research lab. In a paper presented at the NBER Meeting on Scholarly Communication, Open Science and Its Impact (October 2012) we define the phenomenon, describe three cases, and speculate on its organizational benefits and barriers. In a follow-up study funded by the Economics of Knowledge Contribution and Distribution Program of Sloan Foundation, we are collaborating with the administrators of the Zooniverse (currently the largest platform of crowd science projects in operations) to investigate how project characteristics (topic, skill-level, communication, feedback, etc.) and participant characteristics (preferences, motivations, demographics) affect individual project participation, move across projects and dropout. Some of the results would be applicable more generally to all crowd interactions beyond the realm of science.

Crowdfunding (with C. Rossi-Lamastra and M.G. Colombo). We have a dataset of projects launched from Kickstarter.com in the areas of technology, videogame, design and films. We are studying the impact of the early adopters on the likelihood of success of the project.

Selected publications

- Bridges or Isolates? Investigating Social Networks of Academic Inventors, forthcoming in Research Policy (with M. Sobrero and E. Forti).

- Foreign Born Scientists:  Mobility Patterns for Sixteen Countries. Nature Biotechnology, 30(12):1250-1253, 2012 (with G. Scellato and P. Stephan).

- Changing Incentives to Publish. Science, August 5 2011, 333, 702 (with G. Scellato and P. Stephan). [publisher] [article reprint]

- The Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research. What do we know and what we don’t. Industrial and Corporate Change, 20(1):201-213, 2011 (with C. Antonelli and A. Geuna).

- The grace period in international patent law and its effects on the timing of disclosure. Research Policy, 39:200-213, 2010 (with G. Scellato).

- Using Content Analysis to Investigate the Research Paths Chosen by Scientists Over Time, Scientometrics, 83(1):321-335, 2010 (with Simpkins C.L., Li B. and Ram A.).

- Do Scientists Get Fundamental Research Ideas by Solving Practical Problems?, Industrial and Corporate Change, 18:671-699, 2009. Emerald Citation of Excellence 2009. [preprint]

- The Unequal Benefits of Academic Patenting for Science and Engineering Research", IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 56(1):16-30, 2009 (with M. Calderini and A. Vezzulli).

- Academic entrepreneurship: critical issues and lessons for Europe” in Varga A. (ed.), E. Elgar, pp.163-190, 2009, ISBN 9781845429317 (with Francesco Lissoni). [book chapter]

- If Star Scientists Do Not Patent. The Effect of Productivity, Basicness and Impact on the Decision to Patent in the Academic World, Research Policy, 36(3):303-319, 2007 (with M. Calderini and A. Vezzulli).

Working papers

- Choice of Country by the Foreign Born for PhD and Postdoctoral Study: A Sixteen-Country Perspective (with P. Stephan and G. Scellato). NBER Working paper number 18809.

- The Mover's Advantage. Scientific Performance of Mobile Academics (with G. Scellato and P. Stephan). NBER Working Paper number 18577.

- Mobile Scientists and International Networks (with G. Scellato and P. Stephan). NBER Working Paper number 18613.

- Crowd Science: The Organization of Scientific Research in Open Collaborative Projects (with H. Sauermann). NBER Workshop on Scholarly Communication, Open Science and Its Impact, Boston, 23 Nov 2012. [download]

- How scientists diversify their research interests: Empirical evidence from a new methodology (with C. Rossi-Lamastra)

- Inventor's Knowledge Set as the Antecedent of Patent Value. Presented at the EPIP conference, Sep. 2012 (with A. Mohammadi)

Press coverage - Globsci

Inside Higher Education, May 15, 2012

Times Higher Education, May 24, 2012

IEEE Spectrum, September 22, 2012

Nature, October 18, 2012

Corriere della Sera, October 28, 2012

Die Zeit, April 18, 2013

Courrier International (Le Monde), April 22, 2013