Sharing the knowledge burden

As the stock of human knowledge increases, the time needed to move oneself to the knowledge frontier grows. In a 2009 paper, Benjamin Jones noted:If knowledge accumulates as technology advances, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden. Innovators can compensate through lengthening educational phases and narrowing expertise, but these responses come at the cost of reducing individual innovative capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity-a greater reliance on teamwork-and negative implications for growth. Building on this "burden of knowledge" mechanism, this paper first presents six facts about innovator behaviour. I show that age at first invention, specialization, and teamwork increase over time in a large micro-data set of inventors. Furthermore, in cross-section, specialization and teamwork appear greater in deeper areas of knowledge, while, surprisingly, age at first invention shows little variation across fields. A model then demonstrates how these facts can emerge in tandem. The theory further develops explicit implications for economic growth, providing an explanation for why productivity growth rates did not accelerate through the 20th century despite an enormous expansion in collective research effort.

The growing "burden of knowledge" needed to move science forward has increased the age at which researchers begin making contributions, while also increasing instances of collaboration on research. This helps explain why a huge increase in resources dedicated to research over the 20th century didn't lead to an acceleration in productivity growth.

See it on Scoop.it, via Knowledge Economy

http://www.scoop.it/t/knowledge-economy/p/1935417962/sharing-the-knowledge-burden/original Sharing the knowledge burden