Economics of innovation · Strategy
Fundación Damm Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Duke University, Fuqua School of Business
Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research
Research on how scientific knowledge becomes economic value: the rise and decline of corporate science, the markets that trade technology, and why deep technologies so often fail to reach the people who could use them.
Science, Technology, and the Future of American Innovation
How the American innovation system reorganized as large corporations withdrew from basic research, and what it would take to turn scientific advance back into broad economic growth.
Why Deep Technology Fails and What It Would Take to Succeed
Why deep technologies stall on the way to market. The book traces the gap between characterizing what a technology is and producing the evidence of what it will do in a buyer's hands, and asks what allows markets to absorb deep technology.
My work sits at the intersection of strategy and the economics of innovation. It studies how scientific knowledge is produced inside firms, how it moves between them, and how it does or does not become commercial value. Much of it draws on large-scale data linking firms to their patents and scientific publications.
The rise of in-house corporate research over the twentieth century, its decline since the 1980s, and what that retreat from basic science means for economic growth.
When scientific knowledge becomes tradable, why patents move across firm boundaries, and how a division of innovative labor among universities, startups, and incumbents is coordinated.
Why deep technologies fail to reach the market even when the underlying science is sound, and how public science and government procurement shape private research.
Journal articles
Book chapters
Policy and public writing
Patent
I build and maintain DISCERN, an open firm-level dataset that links public companies to their patents and scientific publications over several decades. It supports much of my empirical work and has been used widely by other researchers.
DISCERN 2.0 · 2024 · doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13619821
At Fuqua I teach Principles of Strategy and Emerging Markets Strategy in the MBA and Executive MBA programs, and Economics of Innovation in the PhD program. Teaching Excellence Awards in 2011 and 2013.
Sharon Belenzon has been on the faculty of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business since 2008 and holds the Fundación Damm Distinguished Professorship of Business Administration. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research has appeared in the American Economic Review, Management Science, Organization Science, the Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy, and Science.