Innovation in an Aging Society

The US scientific workforce is aging – the average age of both US academics as a whole and medical school faculty has increased from the early 40s in 1970 to the late 40s and the average NIH PIs is now 50. The aging of our scientific workforce is troublesome because people are often viewed as most innovative at young ages, and our output of scientific publications has declined as a share of world output. Overlaying these trends, the US is increasingly turning to innovation as an economic driver and the demands on biomedical research in particular will both increase and shift as the U.S. and World populations age. The NIH Directorate has identified this confluence of factors as, “The number-one issue in American science (Kaiser [2009]).” This Program Project proposal draws together 5 projects with 3 cores (Administration; Data Acquisition and Construction; and Program Development) and the extensive administrative capabilities of the National Bureau of Economic Research to address 4 issues critical to our understanding of how our aging scientific workforce will affect our innovative output, the associated health and economic impacts, and possible policy responses. Combined with this research, the data we produce and distribute will catalyze the development of a person-based economic analysis of innovation and of aging and innovation. Our focus will be on biomedical scientists, measuring innovation broadly using publications, patents, citations, and drug approvals. Our specific aims are:
1. To estimate how the aging of our scientific workforce will affect innovative output, especially among biomedical scientists and to explore policy responses. All projects will address these issues. At the individual-level, Projects 1 and 5 delve into the careers of scientists, studying how major life-cycle events such as fertility, geographic mobility, and retirement mediate the relationship between age and innovation. To address the increasing diversity of the scientific workforce, Project 2 will focus specifically on how the relationship between age and innovation varies by gender, race, ethnicity, and immigration status. Recognizing that scientists frequently work in teams, Project 5 and a pilot will study how the age-composition of teams affects their innovative output. Project 4 will study how age affects researchers’ response to new opportunities and Project 3 will study how the aging of entire fields will affect the production and acceptance of high-impact and transformative work. The projects will predict the consequences of an aging scientific community and generate implications for the formation and support of researchers and teams and the consequences of institutional features such as pervasive post-docs.
2. To estimate the health impacts and the local economic spillovers from biomedical research. Medical technology has contributed greatly to improvements in health and policy makers increasingly look to research to drive local economic growth. Project 4 and the Data Core will estimate the health impact and economic spillovers from research. These estimates will be used by all projects to quantify how changes in research will impact health and the economies where research is produced.
3. To examine how the aging of the population will affect the need for biomedical science and how researchers will respond. The population as a whole is aging, increasing the need for biomedical research and making research on diseases affecting the elderly particularly important. Project 4 will estimate how the need for research will change with population aging and how researchers will respond, generating policy prescriptions to best target resources (e.g. to younger versus older researchers).
4. To assess how retirement programs affect the retirement of scientists and how retirement programs can be used to address the aging of the US scientific workforce (Project 1).
5. To develop and maintain a range of datasets on biomedical innovators as a whole, and biomedical scientists in particular. Included in this work will be an integrated, large-scale, disambiguated, longitudinal dataset on the careers of biomedical scientists. These data will combine biographical information with data on publications, patents, funding, and citations. The projects will use these data and provide a sophisticated set of end-users to refine and add components to these data. A version of the data, comprising all elements, will be made available as infrastructure for academic research.
6. To develop a research community studying aging and innovation and innovation using individual-level data more generally. The program project structure provides a unique platform to combine the construction of large-scale data infrastructure with a broad set of interrelated research, which will provide a critical mass of research to demonstrate the researchability of person-based studies of innovation. We will also emphasize dissemination through conferences and fund a small number of strategically chosen pilot projects to catalyze the development of a dynamic research community.