The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Science

What's New Under the Sun

mattsclancy.substack.com

What academia knows* about innovation. Click to read What's New Under the Sun, by Matt Clancy, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

ScienceSociety / politics / economy

’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
139 from 1 Dec 2019 to 14 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (6 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://mattsclancy.substack.com/feed

2026 4

  1. The non-material consequences of growth
  2. An Atlas of Innovation
  3. Social science at the NSF
  4. A little progress is worth a trillion dollars

2025 11

  1. Innovation Job Market Papers 2025 (2/2)
  2. Innovation Job Market Papers 2025 (1/2)
  3. What if the NIH had been 40% smaller?
  4. Come Work With Me
  5. May 2025 Updates
  6. Funding R&D in Developing Countries
  7. March 2025 Updates
  8. Frequently Asked Questions About US Government Funding for R&D
  9. Government Funding for R&D and Productivity Growth
  10. Do Prediction Technologies Help Novices or Experts More?
  11. Prediction Technologies and Innovation

2024 18

  1. Innovation Job Market Papers 2024 (3/3)
  2. Innovation Job Market Papers 2024 (2/3)
  3. Innovation Job Market Papers 2024 (1/3)
  4. Training Scientists in Low and Middle Income Countries
  5. Time for More Living Literature Reviews
  6. The Decline in Writing About Progress
  7. Incentives to Invent at Universities
  8. Twitter and the Spread of Academic Knowledge
  9. When the Robots Take Your Job
  10. Some Announcements
  11. May 2024 Updates
  12. Can we learn about innovation from patent data?
  13. Do Studies Based on Patents Get Different Results?
  14. Patents (Weakly) Predict Innovation
  15. How many inventions are patented?
  16. Training enhances the value of new technology
  17. Teaching Innovative Entrepreneurship
  18. January 2024 Updates

2023 21

  1. Teacher Influence and Innovation
  2. Innovation Job Market Papers 2023
  3. Two Announcements for PhD students
  4. When Research Over There Isn't Helpful Here
  5. October 2023 Updates
  6. Literature Reviews and Innovation
  7. September 2023 Updates
  8. Big firms have different incentives
  9. Geography and What Gets Researched
  10. How to Impede Technological Progress
  11. Does Advanced AI Lead to 10x Faster Economic Growth?
  12. And now for something completely different
  13. The Size of Firms and the Nature of Innovation
  14. When Technology Goes Bad
  15. Can taste beat peer review?
  16. What does peer review know?
  17. Biases Against Risky Research
  18. February 2023 Updates
  19. Announcing a Site Index (and an AMA)
  20. Innovators Who Immigrate
  21. Age and the Nature of Innovation

2022 30

  1. Age and the Impact of Innovations
  2. December 2022 Updates
  3. Answering Your Questions
  4. Taking Your Questions
  5. Are Technologies Inevitable?
  6. Remote Breakthroughs
  7. September 2022 Updates
  8. What if we could automate invention?
  9. Innovation at the Office
  10. July 2022 Updates
  11. Do Academic Citations Measure the Impact of New Ideas?
  12. How common is independent discovery?
  13. Audio: How common is independent discovery?
  14. June 2022 Updates
  15. Science is getting harder
  16. Audio: Science is getting harder
  17. A New Things Under the Sun Update
  18. April 2022 Updates
  19. When Extreme Necessity is the Mother of Invention
  20. Audio: When Extreme Necessity is the Mother of Invention
  21. Steering Science with Prizes
  22. Audio: Steering Science with Prizes
  23. Progress in Programming as Evolution
  24. Audio: Progress in Programming as Evolution
  25. February 2022 Updates
  26. Pulling more fuel efficient cars into existence
  27. "Patent Stocks" and Technological Inertia
  28. January 2022 Updates
  29. Partnership with the Institute for Progress
  30. Building a new research field

2021 30

  1. Gender and What Gets Researched
  2. Most Popular Articles of Last Year
  3. Is Technological Progress Slowing?
  4. Money! Novelty! Coworkers!
  5. Combinatorial innovation and technological progress in the very long run
  6. Conservatism in science
  7. Remote Work and the Future of Innovation
  8. Science as a map of unfamiliar terrain
  9. The Future of New Things Under the Sun
  10. The "idea" of being an entrepreneur
  11. Entrepreneurship is contagious
  12. An example of successful innovation by distributed teams: academia
  13. No editors -> no publication bias?
  14. Innovation gets (mostly) harder
  15. Why is publication bias worse in some fields than in others?
  16. Publication Bias is a Real Thing
  17. An example of high returns to publicly funded R&D
  18. What are the returns to R&D?
  19. One Study, Many Results
  20. Measuring Knowledge Spillovers: The Trouble with Patent Citations
  21. Ripples in the River of Knowledge
  22. More Science Leads to More Innovation
  23. What Has Covid-19 Taught Us About Remote Work?
  24. Free Knowledge and Innovation
  25. Adjacent Knowledge is Useful
  26. Proximity: More Important for Meeting than Collaborating?
  27. What's Ails the Social Sciences?
  28. Cities as a Platform to Mix Up Knowledge
  29. How a field fixes itself: the applied turn in economics
  30. How useful are learning curves, really?

2020 20

  1. On Collaborating with an AI, Writing, and Innovation
  2. How bad is publish-or-perish for the quality of science?
  3. How long does it take to go from science to technology?
  4. Importing Knowledge
  5. Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find Because of the Burden of Knowledge?
  6. Is there a Price for a Covid-19 Vaccine?
  7. Optimal Kickstarter
  8. The Case for Remote Work
  9. How Important Are Spillovers?
  10. Collaboration and Canceled Conferences
  11. Does Chasing Citations Lead to Bad Science?
  12. How Useful is Science?
  13. Progress or Stagnation in Film
  14. More People = More Ideas?
  15. The Internet and Access to Distant Ideas
  16. The Slowdown we Wanted?
  17. Maybe There is No Technological Slowdown
  18. Growth when Innovation is Combinatorial
  19. Copyright is too long
  20. Innovation as Combination

2019 5

  1. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
  2. Innovation and the City
  3. Does Science Self-Correct?
  4. Innovation in Teams
  5. Research on innovation