Assessing Knowledge Worker Productivity: the Role of Patents, Publications and Scientific Opportunity Recognition

Knowledge work has superseded manual work as the primary mechanism of wealth creation throughout the western hemisphere. Society's present and future welfare will depend on knowledge workers and the way we assess, reward and improve their productivity (Drucker 1999). The seminal works of Taylor, whose methods of scientific management (Taylor 1911) greatly enhanced the productivity of manual work, served as a point of departure for many scholars addressing questions of knowledge worker productivity. However, it soon became clear that knowledge work is different from manual work. Thinking, the most important component of knowledge creation, is largely invisible to observers. Therefore, Taylor's observation-based methods were untransferable. Especially in the context of university science (which is the focus of this paper) the assessment of knowledge work has shifted to output-oriented measures like publications and patents, which are now used interchangeably to assess scientific achievements of academic researchers (Schachman 2006). Concerns that patenting could displace publishing as the primary mode of disseminating university research results proved to be unfounded: Azoulay et al. found that patenting does not preclude publishing and suggest that scientific opportunity is the true origin of research resulting in both patents and publications (Azoulay et al. 2007). Opportunity recognition has been an integral part of the business management literature in general and the emerging field of entrepreneurship research in particular (Lumpkin and Lichtenstein 2005, Ardichvili et al. 2000). However, this literature is limited to business opportunities. To date, scientific opportunities are described in the context of their respective discipline as they appear, but there seems to be little effort to link them knowledge work productivity gains. Our paper is conceptual and will attempt a transfer of the opportunity recognition construct from the entrepreneurship domain to the scientific opportunity context. This is in line with calls for further research asking scholars to apply the construct to "community, government, nonprofit, and other non private-sector organizations" (Ardichvili 2000). If we accept that (a) patents and publication counts will remain primary indicators of knowledge worker productivity in the years to come (for lack of better ones), and (b) the process of knowledge creation per se is inherently difficult to observe, analyse and improve, then it follows that any significant advancement is most likely to come from a careful choice of the starting point, i.e. the initially chosen scientific opportunity. We do not challenge the role of patents and publications as tools of knowledge work assessment, but would like to study how these classes of outputs are influenced by scientific opportunity, an important factor that has received little attention so far. Based on a recent review of the (entrepreneurial) opportunity recognition literature (Frank and Mitterer 2009) we based our analysis on a school of thought that seeks to explain opportunity recognition as an interplay of multiple variables relating to human capital, cognitive processes, individual learning and social capital. We isolated variables with explanatory power in the scientific opportunity context and report first results from a pilot case study conducted at a large German research university.