Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance, Novelty, and Resource Allocation in...

Area of Science:

• Management Science
• Innovation Studies
• Organizational Behavior

Background:

• Project selection is crucial for innovating organizations.
• Evaluating frontier scientific research presents unique challenges.
• Intellectual distance between proposals and evaluators' expertise is a key factor.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between intellectual distance and research project evaluations.
• To understand biases in the assessment of novel scientific ideas.
• To inform resource allocation in scientific endeavors.

Main Methods:

• A grant proposal process was designed and executed at a research university.
• Evaluators and proposals were randomly assigned, creating 2,130 evaluator-proposal pairs.
• Systematic evaluation patterns were analyzed.

Main Results:

• Evaluators assigned lower scores to research proposals closer to their expertise.
• Highly novel research proposals also received systematically lower scores.
• Findings suggest boundedly rational biases in evaluating new ideas.

Conclusions:

• Intellectual distance influences research evaluation, contrary to simple noise or self-interest.
• Understanding these biases is critical for effective policy and resource allocation.
• This research has implications for managing scientific knowledge accumulation.