Woo and Kwon Each Receive Young Scholars Award in South Korea

Posted July 11, 2018

Seokkyun Woo and Seokbeom Kwon, Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy each received the Young Scholars Award 2018 from the International Schumpeter Society at the society’s biennial conference in Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, from July 2 - 4.

Woo received the award for his paper co-authored with Yin Li (Ph.D. SPP, 2016), assistant professor at Fudan University China. In the paper titled “The role of curiosity in science: evidence from Ig Nobel Prizes,” the authors demonstrate how intrinsic motivation of academic scientists can impact the development of scientific fields by examining the case of the Ig Nobel Prize. They find that the marginal effect of Ig Nobel Prize on scientific fields is on average a 47% increase in publication activities, and the effect is sustained years after the prize. They conclude that as a “curiosity-inducing” institution, the Ig Nobel Prize encourages scientists to work on creative ideas out of intrinsic motivations.

Kwon’s paper the “Impact of patent ownership transfer on patent holdup risk and innovation of firms,” is the first essay of his three-essay doctoral dissertation. The paper examines how a firm’s patent-purchase affects the research and development outcome of a rival if the firm has strategic stakes in the use of the purchased patents against the rival firm. He finds that if a firm’s external patents acquisition imposes a greater level of patent holdup risk to its rival, then the rival becomes less productive in research and development on related technology to the patents that were purchased by the local firm. However, this effect disappears over time as firms implement the “coping-strategy.”

The International Schumpeter Society was founded in 1986 to conduct scientific research of economic development and innovation in conformity to the research of Joseph Alois Schumpeter.

The School of Public Policy is a unit of the Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.