Scott Stern doesn’t work in a laboratory or have a degree in the hard sciences. You’ll never find him using a genome sequencer or an MRI scanner. Yet he knows more about some aspects of science than almost any practicing scientist does.

That’s because Stern, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been a leader in expanding the social-scientific study of the scientific enterprise. Stern’s own body of scholarship, dating to the mid 1990s, encompasses issues such as the flow of knowledge in biology, the financial incentives facing scientists, and the role of patents in spreading or limiting knowledge. Studying these topics helps Stern and his colleagues paint a detailed picture of science in action, and the role it plays in fostering innovation and economic growth.

“Science and innovation are easy things to theorize about, but you’re likely to be led by some biases or your own agenda rather than an accurate understanding of their complexity and how they work,” Stern says. Instead, he advocates for careful research studies that produce quantifiable results about the inner workings of science.

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