Organizational Unit:

School of Public Policy

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70716

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Organizational Unit

Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

Includes Organization(s)

Organizational Unit

Technology Policy and Assessment Center

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https://finding-aids.library.gatech.edu/agents/corporate_entities/1033

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 380

Path-dependencies faced by select policies toward solid-state lighting

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-12-18) Smith, Alexander M.

The studies in this dissertation – concerning inter-firm R&D collaboration, patent production and sharing, and electric power infrastructure – will illustrate the influence of path-dependency on outcomes delivered by policies stimulating innovation in the lighting sector. This dissertation will build upon prior findings in path-dependency studies by applying path-dependency to distinct policies: collaboration-enhancing policies, patent licensing requirements, and lighting subsidies paired with emissions regulations. In doing so, the studies will highlight the social factors that influence lighting innovation. Just as the dominance of the electric lightbulb was not produced from a good idea alone – needing trade cartels and patent attorneys to achieve just its initial growth – so too do contemporary ideas for changing the way we illuminate the world rely on resources far greater than new technology ideas alone. In highlighting factors that frustrate the aims of contemporary innovation policies towards lighting, this dissertation aims to inform the design of future innovation policies such that future policies may account for influential factors and design strategies that nullify or take advantage of such factors to enact change.
Prevention and Reversal of Chronic Disease: Lessons Learned

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-11) Kostoff, Ronald N.

For a decade, our research group has been developing protocols to prevent and reverse chronic diseases. The present monograph outlines the lessons we have learned from both conducting the studies and identifying common patterns in the results. The main product of our studies is a five-step treatment protocol to reverse any chronic disease, based on the following systemic medical principle: at the present time, removal of cause is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, condition for restorative treatment to be effective. Implementation of the five-step treatment protocol is as follows: Step 1: Obtain a detailed medical and habit/exposure history from the patient. Step 2: Administer written and clinical performance and behavioral tests to assess the severity of symptoms and performance measures. Step 3: Administer laboratory tests (blood, urine, imaging, etc) Step 4: Eliminate ongoing contributing factors to the chronic disease Step 5: Implement treatments for the chronic disease This individually-tailored chronic disease treatment protocol can be implemented with the data available in the biomedical literature now. It is general and applicable to any chronic disease that has an associated substantial research literature (with the possible exceptions of individuals with strong genetic predispositions to the disease in question or who have suffered irreversible damage from the disease). To prevent any chronic disease, eliminate those contributing factors that serve as a basis for Step 4.
Three essays on the growth of the market for patents and its challenges to innovation policy

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-10-01) Kwon, Seok Beom

A sheer number of US patents have been transferred through market transactions and that the size of the market for patents has grown. In this dissertation, I conduct three complementary studies to examine how the market for patents shapes technological innovation. Drawing on the broad discussion of the benefits and costs of patent ownership transfer for invention, I develop three research questions, and in three essays I address each of them through building theoretical models and conducting empirical analysis. In the first study, I examine a firm's economic incentive for purchasing patents to gain strategic benefit over market rivals and how the firm's patents purchase results in the market rival's innovative activities. In the second study, I investigate the antitrust issue of patent consolidation caused by the purchase of multiple patents by a small number of firms and the impact of a governmental authorities' regulation of the generated patent monopolies by patent consolidation on the development of follow-on innovations. In the last study, I analyze the impact of granting a firm the exclusive access to a university's inventions through patents transfer on the follow-on innovative activities. Altogether, this dissertation contributes to advancing our understanding of the distinctive nature of the market for patents from the market for technology, and it extends the conventional discussion of how the patents system may affect innovation.
Adverse Effects of Wireless Radiation

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-10) Kostoff, Ronald N.

This monograph identifies adverse effects of wireless radiation as reported in the premier biomedical literature. It shows that most of the laboratory experiments that have been performed are not designed to elicit the more severe adverse effects reflective of the real-life operating environment in which wireless radiation is embedded. The monograph includes a substantial bibliography of papers that present these adverse effects, and shows that what has been reported is the tip of the iceberg of the full spectrum of potential adverse effects from wireless radiation.
The co-construction of court-made patent policy and firm strategy

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-07-30) Sung, Elie J.

The need to accommodate new technologies at an increasingly fast pace has led the judicial branch to become a key source of changes in patent policy in the United States. This dissertation examines the co-construction of patent policy and innovation strategy in the judicial branch of government. Its main contributions are to the economics of innovation literature and to the policy process literature. A long-lasting debate on the relation between patent and innovation has led to a multitude of studies supporting each side of the debate about the desirability of strong patents, as well as a lack of conclusive empirical evidence, mainly due to methodological challenges in estimating the impact of a change in patent strength. Leveraging a shock created by the US Supreme Court, I show that the common belief that weaker patents lead to fewer innovations is wrong (for a specific aspect of patent), while accounting for the heterogeneous patent-related strategies. Using mixed-methodology (interviews, court documents and census data), I find that the arguments made in court mirror the debate in the academic literature and I show that impact on innovation is contingent on firms’ characteristics and innovation strategies. Motivated by the heterogeneous impact of patent policy, stakeholders attempt to influence the US Supreme Court decisions. Therefore, taking advantage of this setting, I address a gap in the policy process literature, which has neglected the judicial branch of government. This dissertation builds on perspectives from the legal and political science literatures, examining policymaking processes in the US Supreme Court to incorporate the judicial branch of government in the corpus of policy process literature. Focusing on the role of stakeholders and how they use information strategically, I find evidence of influence of different types of information at the two phases of the policy process, a distinction unobserved in settings considered in the existing policy process literature.
Innovation in government: The diffusion of policy and organizational change

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-07-22) St. Clair, Rebekah

Beginning in the late nineteenth century Woodrow Wilson (1887) proposed the idea that government can be divided into two broad functions: politics and administration. While the debate remains about the extent to which these functions of government are actually separated, Wilson contributed a critical part of how we think about public administration: that there are in fact different dimensions to government. These different dimensions are no doubt related in varying degrees (Svara, 2014), but where literature has been lacking is in teasing out the complexity of government by trying to understand the different dimensions, specifically how they relate to each other. To better understand these relations, the following dissertation looks at two dimensions of government that are theoretically and practically designed to change to meet the needs of their communities. Specifically, I ask: how is the policy-making function of government related to the administrative/organizational function in multilevel systems of government? Here, I examine the extent to which these two different types of change are driven by the same factors. Due to the interwoven nature of our federalist system, I further examine how these functions relate both over time and at all levels of government, and in two different cases: one where change begins at the federal government level and diffuses downward, and one where change begins at the local level and diffuses upward. Using both logistic and qualitative comparative analyses (QCAs), I ultimately conclude that change is not just change. Policy and organizational change are largely driven by different factors; however, how these two dimensions of government differ is highly contingent on both level of government and origin of change.
Bridging the valley of death in biomedicine with translational research: Assessing the impact of National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Translational Science Award

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-06-21) Kim, Yeon Hak Hak

Despite large investment in biomedical research by government, foundations and private organizations around the world, we are not experiencing an increase in the new medicine reaching the market. Many studies point out that this productivity decline in biomedicine is mainly due to the difficulty in translating basic science into clinical setting. Translational research emerged as a key research policy tool to address this problem over the last decade. Translational research aims to bridge the gap between basic science and clinical science to accelerate the process of moving research innovation into clinical use. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) took the lead in supporting translational research by developing the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) in 2006. In this dissertation, the author examined the impact of NIH’s effort on supporting translational research focusing on two topics, which are collaboration network structure and production of translational publications. Regarding the collaboration landscape, the change of social network analysis measures showed that the CTSA award had an impact in changing the biomedical research landscape into denser and less centralized form. The result of the network regression models showed that receiving CTSA award led individual institutions to collaborate more with other institutions. For the test on the production of translational publications, which is the second topic of interest, a unique measure using the composition of forward citation of publications is introduced. The results from difference-in-difference regression and mediation tests showed that the CTSA award leads to the increase of publications and this relationship is mediated by inter-collaboration feature of institutions after the CTSA program is well stabilized. The author expects that the study will provide insight into the effects of translational research initiatives and have implications on the government policy regarding biomedical research more broadly.
The effects of distributed solar on utilities and their customers

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-04-01) Beppler, Ross C.

This dissertation evaluates the impact increasing penetrations of distributed solar will have on the electricity industry. It reconciles an analysis of the effect of increasing DPV penetration at the system scale, with an understanding of how installing DPV alters behavior at the household level. To provide such a comprehensive view on the role of DPV in the evolving utility, I construct a utility financial model and populate that with customer load and solar data. I compliment that analysis with utility billing data to gain insights on the interaction between solar installation, rate design, and electricity consumption. Results indicate that solar is likely to exacerbate existing inequities in cost allocation, the value of the solar resource is highly contextual, and installing solar is likely to change household energy consumption patterns. By incorporating insights from the macro and micro level, I demonstrate the need for markets, regulations, and rates which send appropriate signals to encourage system level efficiencies. This dissertation bridges utility modeling literature with empirical work to better understand prosumer behavior and shed light on the future of utility operations.
Strengthening exposure limits for toxic substance combinations

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019) Kostoff, Ronald N.

Toxic stimuli exposure limits are typically based on single stressor experiments, but are presently applicable to toxic stimuli in isolation or in combination with other toxic stimuli. In the latter case, typically less of each constituent of the combination is required to cause damage compared to the amount determined from single stressor experiments. This monograph presents a simplified approach to improving regulatory exposure limits for toxic stimuli. The approach will partially account for the enhanced adverse effects of toxic stimuli combinations. It 1) assumes that all potential toxic stimuli to which an individual might be exposed have the same mechanisms/modes of action on biological mechanisms, and are, thus, indistinguishable by the impacted organism; 2) converts the doses of exposures to toxic stimuli to NOAEL fractions; 3) adds all the NOAEL fractions from these exposures to toxic stimuli; and 4) divides all the present exposure limits by the total number of NOAELs obtained. It would reduce present single-stressor-based exposure limits by an order of magnitude or more across the board. The newly posited approach does not account for hormetic, antagonistic, or synergistic effects of toxic stimuli in combination. It does not adjust for 1) low-dose toxicants with adverse effects that have been under-reported, or 2) exposure limits (like the OSHA PELs) that are orders of magnitude above levels shown by published single stressor studies to have caused adverse effects.
Prevention and Reversal of Peripheral Neuropathy/Peripheral Arterial Disease

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019) Kostoff, Ronald N.

This monograph presents a five-step treatment protocol to prevent and reverse Peripheral Neuropathy (PN)/Peripheral Arterial Disease (PAD), based on the following systemic medical principle: at the present time, removal of cause is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, condition for restorative treatment to be effective. Implementation of the five-step PN/PAD treatment protocol is as follows: Step 1: Obtain a detailed medical and habit/exposure history from the patient. Step 2: Administer written and clinical performance and behavioral tests to assess the severity of the higher-level symptoms and degradation of executive functions Step 3: Administer laboratory tests (blood, urine, imaging, etc) Step 4: Eliminate ongoing PN/PAD contributing factors Step 5: Implement PN/PAD treatments This individually-tailored PN/PAD treatment protocol can be implemented with the data currently available in the biomedical literature. Additionally, while the methodology developed for this study was applied to comprehensive identification of diagnostics, contributing factors, and treatments for PN/PAD, it is general and applicable to any chronic disease/condition that, like PN/PAD, has an associated substantial research literature. Thus, the protocol and methodology developed to prevent or reverse PN/PAD can be used to prevent or reverse any chronic disease (with the possible exceptions of individuals with strong genetic predispositions to the disease in question or who have suffered irreversible damage from the disease).