Catalyst Funds & Manulife Grants

CIFAR Catalyst Grants (3 projects)

Bill Lazonick & Andrew Schrank:
Analyzing the mass-manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines, awarded December 2020.  The proposed research builds on AIRnet’s in-depth studies, carried out over the last decade, of a) the organizational dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry, with an emphasis on the interactions among Big Pharma, venture-backed biotech companies, academic research, and government support; b) the historical evolution of the productive capabilities of the world’s major pharmaceutical companies (including, in our studies to date, Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, and Roche); c) the tension between innovation (value creation) and financialization (value extraction) in pharmaceuticals; and d) the specific challenges of the development, manufacture, and delivery of countermeasures in pandemic preparedness and response.

Dan Breznitz & Ken Lipartito:
Surveillance Innovation and the Distribution of Resources and Opportunities, awarded November 2020.   To unpack the distributional and equity effects of surveillance, we take a long-term longitudinal approach, using history to ascertain how and why surveillance has become implicated in capitalism. The collection of information about people, populations, and business processes – via accounting, filing and communication systems, and statistical aggregation – has been a feature of capitalism for more than a century. Taking a historical approach will allow us to examine the unfolding of cases to see how surveillance operates in the economy and identify the ways it may produce unequal outcomes, while providing a basis for identifying the most important, enduring features of this system.

Andrew Schrank & Susan Helper:
Distribution-Sensitive Information Policy in a Time of Coronavirus: A Quasi-Experimental Look at Pandemic Response, awarded July 2020.  We have both worked on the MEP independently and are hoping to prevent that loss by joining forces to aggregate and analyze administrative, survey, and interview data on the types and impacts of program spending under both the cost-share (control) and CARES Act (treatment) modalities in 2020 against the backdrop of prior years (pretest) in which all MEP funds were subject to the cost-share requirement. The results will speak not only to the question of pandemic response but to the design and implementation of DSIPs more generally, and should lead to at least one (and in all likelihood more) academic article(s) and collaborative follow-up research designed to track the different MEP projects going forward—perhaps in conjunction with work on IRAP that’s already being undertaken by IEP group member Dan Breznitz and his colleagues.

Manulife Grants (2 projects) - to read more about Manulife and CIFAR grants, click here

Goldie Nejat & Amos Zehavi:
Innovating for Special Needs in an Era of Social Isolation: Socially Assistive Robots Helping to Combat the Dangers of Isolation for Vulnerable Populations While Promoting Disease Prevention, awarded July 2020 as part of the Manulife CIFAR Population Health grants.  The main objective of this collaborative project is to investigate how socially assistive robotic technology innovation, transfer and absorption might help address the COVID-19 related problems of vulnerable populations - and how innovation policy could be employed to advance this goal. Socially assistive robots (SARs) can be especially useful in helping vulnerable individuals whose level of care and social interactions have drastically decreased. In general, robots are resistant to biological pathogens and can be sanitized with existing chemicals, which makes them a perfect technology to exploit to address the urgency of assistance during COVID-19.

Irene Bloemraad (BMB) & Woody Powell:
Innovative Inclusion or Civic Exclusion? The Response of Nonprofit Organizations to the COVID-19 Pandemic, awarded July 2020 as part of the Manulife CIFAR Population Health grants. This project bridges the core questions of two new CIFAR programs, Boundaries, Membership and Belonging, and Innovation, Equity and the Future, by leveraging two on-going data collection efforts that examine community-based nonprofits. BMB co-director Irene Bloemraad’s team is building a dataset of 772 immigrant-serving organizations, with a focus on health care and immigrant legal services in Northern California. The team has been mapping the location of these organizations and capturing web-based data about their mission and services. In tandem, but unknown to Bloemraad, Woody Powell’s research team at Stanford University has generated a random sample of 800 nonprofit organizations pursuing an array of activities across six U.S. metro regions: San Francisco, Dallas, Detroit, Miami, Lancaster, and Sioux Falls. The team is investigating the pattern and content of the nonprofits’ activities through analyses of their
websites, social media pages and newsletters.