The Creation and Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge: An empirical analysis of Economic Nobel Prizes and Open Innovation scientific performance

The creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge have been widely studied. However, studies revealing the influence of peer collaboration on the productivity of academics with widely recognized performance remain scarce. The same can be said about the size of collaboration networks and the expected range of co-authors for maximizing scholarly productivity. In this sense, the present investigation aimed to analyze the possible collaboration-scientific production and collaboration-dissemination elasticities of knowledge. To this end data was collected on the scientific production and collaboration of the 500 authors of the most cited articles on Open Innovation, as well as of all 86 Nobel Laureates in Economics available in the Scopus database. The data was treated and analyzed using the simple regression statistical technique, based on the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method with the incorporation of nonlinearities, characterized by the use of a Log-Log Model. The results point out that collaboration among peers exerts significant influence on the production and dissemination of knowledge, even among the most prominent individuals in their fields, such as Nobel Laureates in Economics, confirming what is found in the literature on the subject. However, despite what the literature points out, especially concerning the idea that the larger the collaboration network, the higher the productivity, the results found suggest that collaboration networks have the same characteristics of an economic production function, to the extent that after a certain point, the addition of one more researcher in the network generates the effect of decreasing marginal productivity.