Too big to innovate? Exploring organizational size and innovation processes in scientific research Jonathon Mote 1, *, Gretchen Jordan 2 , Jerald Hage 3 , Wilbur Hadden 3 and Aleia Clark 3 1 Department of Organizational Sciences and Communication, 600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20052, USA, 2 360 Innovation LLC, 1135 Shell Avenue, Pacific Grove, CA 93950, USA and 3 Center for Innovation, 2112 Art- Sociology Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA *Corresponding author. Email: jmote@gwu.edu Abstract We explore the impact of organizational size in six federally funded research organizations on a range of organizational processes related to the pursuit of innovation. The data utilized consisted of 266 scientists drawn from 64 research projects across five programmatic research areas: alterna- tive energies, biology, chemistry, geophysical sciences, and material sciences. A sixth project cat- egory was added to accommodate the highly interdisciplinary character of a handful of projects. Although the data had some limitations, it was found that organizational size had a negative impact on three categories of innovation processes: the amount of time spent in research and professional activities, how research time is spent, and exchanges of technical knowledge. In addition, some po- tential advantages of larger size, such as: greater research resources, better perceived managerial quality or a visionary strategy, were not found to be significant. Key words: organizational theory; public research organizations; research and innovation. 1. Introduction In Limited By Design, Crow and Bozeman (1998) posed an import- ant, yet still unanswered, question: how best to design a public re- search sector for innovation. One important design issue is the most appropriate size of research organizations. Is it better to group a large number of disparate research programs together in a relatively large research organization or is it better to have many smaller speci- alized research organizations? This is a particularly critical question for public research organizations, like the many federally funded R&D centers (FFRDC) and similar research organizations, arguably some of the most critical components of a national innovation sys- tem (Nelson 1993). In this paper, we ask a very specific question: does organizational size have an impact on a research organization’s environment for in- novation? While a number of previous studies have examined group, team or project size (Adams et al. 2005; Cohen 1981; Heinze et al. 2009; Seglen and Aksnes 2000), it is important to recognize that modern science is an organizational phenomenon and its pursuit, whether in groups, teams or projects, is strongly determined by the organizational setting (Mote et al. 2011). Further, in contrast to pre- vious studies discussed below which have tended to focus on the im- pact of size on scientific productivity in academic environments, this paper will look at the impact of size on innovation processes and be- haviors in a greatly understudied segment of the R&D infrastruc- ture: public research organizations. 1 Specifically, we will explore this question using data gathered from five FFRDCs and one agency laboratory as part of a study funded by the National Science Foundation through the Science of Science Policy program. Our pri- mary concern in the original study was to identify determinants of scientific innovation, but we began to see patterns across the pro- jects depending on the size of the research organization in which they were embedded. Hence, we undertook this current analysis to better understand these results. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 we discuss previous research on organizational size and innovation. In Section 3 we discuss the data used in this analysis, highlighting the difficulty of gathering the data. We present the analysis and key findings in Section 4. In Section 5, we briefly discuss our findings and their implications for science policy. 2. Organizational size and innovation The issue of organizational size has a long history in organizational studies (Caplow 1957; Kimberly 1976). Studies over the years have V C The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 1 Science and Public Policy, 2015, 1–6 doi: 10.1093/scipol/scv045 Article Science and Public Policy Advance Access published July 31, 2015