About

Sharon Belenzon is the Fundación Damm Distinguished Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy area at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His work examines how businesses shape and are shaped by the innovation ecosystem. He studies why corporations invest in science, why this engagement has declined, and how that shift is transforming the sources of technological progress. His research documents a structural change in the American innovation system: corporate labs once advanced frontier science, but their role has eroded as universities and startups have become the main engines of discovery. This redistribution of inventive activity creates new dependencies between firms and the science base and raises policy challenges related to sustaining the translation of research into market innovation when the actors generating knowledge differ from those commercializing it. Additionally, Belenzon studies how organizational structures and ownership models affect firms’ ability to innovate and compete, comparing how companies across advanced and emerging economies adapt their internal organization to local innovation systems and institutional constraints.

Research topics

• Economics
• Business
• Statistics
• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Marketing
• Social Science
• Industrial organization
• Econometrics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• The Private Value of Innovating for the Government

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Private Value of Innovating for the Government

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Private Value of Innovating for the Government

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-05-01 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen access

  We quantify the private returns to government R&D contracts awarded to firms.We present new evidence that R&D contracts not only finance innovation but also embed an implicit government guarantee of noncompetitive future procurement for the winning R&D contractor.We measure its private value by analyzing stock market reactions to news about R&D contract awards.Using all federal R&D contracts awarded to U.S. publicly traded firms from 1984 through 2015, we find that the average private return on an R&D contract is 19 times its maximum potential revenue.However, returns are highly skewed, with only 7.5% of firms receiving at least one top-quartile contract.Private returns are linked to future production contracts, but only for noncompetitive awards to vertically integrated or large firms.These results suggest that a procurement regime bundling R&D and production contracts enhances value for firms with production capability.We develop a conceptual framework to clarify this innovation policy lever.

  PublisherDOI

• Guaranteed Demand and Corporate R&D

  Management Science · 2025-08-06 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The U.S. government incentivizes firms to develop innovative technologies by awarding research and development (R&D) contracts that often carry an implicit promise of “guaranteed demand.” Firms that demonstrate strong technological capabilities are rewarded with noncompetitive production contracts for the resulting products and services. Using newly assembled data on $4.2 trillion in government procurement contracts from all federal agencies, matched to U.S. publicly traded firms, we document a “crowding-in” effect, where government R&D contracts lead to increased investment in corporate scientific research. This effect is concentrated in large, vertically integrated firms and limited to upstream R&D. We argue that these patterns are best explained by a guaranteed demand mechanism: Firms co-invest in upstream research when success offers a credible path to future noncompetitive production contracts. We develop a theoretical framework to explain when it is optimal for the government to bundle R&D and production contracts. Our analysis shows that guaranteed demand can produce higher quality at a lower total cost for upstream R&D projects when the R&D firms have production capabilities. Our empirical results support these predictions. Additionally, we find that the crowding-in effect has weakened over time as the government has increasingly decoupled R&D contracts from production contracts. We discuss the potential implications of this decoupling. This paper was accepted by Toby Stuart, entrepreneurship and innovation. Funding: Financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation [Grant G-2023-21022]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00087 .

  PublisherDOI

• The reorganization of the American innovation ecosystem and the challenge of translating science

  Industrial and Corporate Change · 2025-09-14

  article

  Abstract In this paper, we focus on lack of translational research as a potential explanation for the recent slowdown in productivity growth, as opposed to a slowdown in science or the decline in the novelty of science. We provide evidence that the translation of science (as measured through citations by patents) has dropped for novel science. This drop is correlated with the withdrawal of large firms from science (especially the physical sciences), as measured through their publications. Fields where venture capital-backed startups have entered have experienced an increase in the translation of science, but their entry has largely occurred in the life sciences and Information and Communication Technology. Sectors such as chemicals and materials science have instead been neglected, both by large firms and startups. Our results point to the role of large firms and their labs in facilitating the translation and commercialization of science. A growing division of innovative labor may have delivered gains from specialization in the production and use of science in some sectors, but appears to have left a void in others.

  PublisherDOI

• The Rise of Absorptive Research in Corporate America: 1945-1980

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-04-01

  reportOpen access

  We study the post-World War II "Golden Age" of American corporate research from 1945 to 1980, using multiple indicators of corporate research activity.We use an ensemble learning approach to classify firms as either Science Leaders, Absorbers or Followers.Our analysis reveals that only a small fraction of firms, whom we call Leaders, invest in internal research that is on the scientific frontier, with the objective to generate breakthrough inventions.Absorbers invest in research principally to absorb external scientific discoveries to fuel their inventive activity.Followers typically generate incremental innovations, using older scientific knowledge.Consistent with this, we find Leaders were more likely to be at the technological frontier, enjoy greater market power, and benefit from government procurement contracts.As universities and startups began to commercialize academic discoveries, the need for "absorptive corporate labs" declined.The shift ultimately transformed the American innovation landscape, deepening the division of innovative labor between universities, startups, and incumbent corporations, with only a select group of Leader firms continuing to invest in basic science.

  PublisherDOI

• The Rise of Absorptive Research in Corporate America: 1945-1980

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Rise of Scientific Research in Corporate America

  Organization Science · 2024-12-17 · 9 citations

  article

  It is widely believed that university and corporate research are complementary: companies invest in research in part to develop the capacity to absorb the knowledge emerging from universities. However, as we show in this paper, corporate research in the United States emerged when American universities were behind the world frontier in scientific research. Why, then, did for-profit businesses choose to invest in creating new knowledge, much of which could spill over to rivals, and whose conduct presented many managerial challenges? We argue that corporate research in America arose in the 1920s to compensate for weak university research, not to complement it. Using newly assembled firm-level data from the 1920s and 1930s, we find that companies invested in research because inventions increasingly relied on science but American universities were unable to meet their needs. Large firms close to the technological frontier and operating in concentrated industries were likely to invest in research, especially in scientific disciplines where American universities lagged behind the scientific frontier. Corporate science seems to have paid off, resulting in novel patents and high market valuations for firms engaged in research. Funding: A. Arora, S. Belenzon, and J. Suh acknowledge support from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. S. Belenzon and Y. Yafeh gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Israel Science Foundation [Grant No. 963-2020]. K. Kosenko is grateful for support from the Bank of Israel. Y. Yafeh acknowledges support from the Krueger Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem School of Business. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18053 .

  PublisherDOI

• Revisiting Stock Market Signals as a Lens for Patent Valuation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Revisiting Stock Market Signals as a Lens for Patent Valuation

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-11-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen access
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Frequent coauthors

• Ashish Arora

  85 shared

• Jungkyu Suh

  New York University

  34 shared

• Andrea Patacconi

  University of East Anglia

  33 shared

• Aaron Chatterji

  28 shared

• Brendan Daley

  Johns Hopkins University

  28 shared

• Mark Schankerman

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  19 shared

• Konstantin Kosenko

  18 shared

• Yishay Yafeh

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  18 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Business Administration

  University of California, Berkeley

  1998

• M.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1994

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1991

Awards & honors

• 2007 Kauffman Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the NBER