Exploring the Relationship between Research Funding and Science Innovation Indicators in Emerging Technologies

Emerging technologies are observed to have similar growth patterns in terms of the number of published journals, conference articles and patents issued. This growth is triggered mostly by funded research. In this paper, we present an analysis of the research funding towards nanotechnology at the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) and its relationship to the research output in nanoscope, an application area of nanotechnology. Our paper analyzes the data collected from 1997 till 2006 and derives a definitive time lag between the allocation of research funds and issued patents and published journals. This assessment is achieved by identifying growth trends in patents, funds and publications and doing a curve-fit analysis using the Fisher-Pry model. We use linear regression analysis to show the correlation between the funding and research outputs. Alongside, non-linear programming objective function optimization technique is used to derive the time lag in years for each of the research outputs from the year of funds granted.