Doctoral Dissertation Research: Do Government Regulations Drive Product Features? The Case of the Global Commercial Drone Industry

This dissertation research advances a novel way to link government science and technology regulation directly to product features by focusing on the global commercial drone/UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) industry. This industry was chosen as an example of a globally diverse high-tech market where multiple product features and parameters are possible.

The intent of this work is to understand what product features are most crucial to the drone industry and how differing standards affect them, as well as what features are most crucial for affecting both the safety and trajectory of a technology. This work has relevance to regulators and other decision-makers who must ascertain how best to strike a balance in their standard specifications to support nascent markets while protecting people from the potential harms of unregulated technologies.

This dissertation will use web scraping and other archival analyses to collect fine-grained product feature data to reveal the relationship between type of institutional support available to a firm (e.g., universities, public-private institutions, science parks) and the types of product innovations that it produces. We will also examine the impact of government standards on product features around weight, height, fuel mileage, and other relevant performance dimensions.

Besides having granular product specifications, governments across the world have diverged as to what regulatory standards they use. We will examine differences between the U.S. and China around weight requirements for pilot licensing and drone registration and investigate how this affects product features. Overall, this research will improve our understanding of the effects of government regulations directly on the product features of firms in nascent markets.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.