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Honors Alumni Collaborate on Independent Research on the Impact of Inventions

Benjamin Miller and Paige Rudin were never students on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus at the same time. And yet, the convergence of their paths is remarkable.

Miller (Economics, ‘10) entered Purdue as a student in the University Honors Program, the forerunner to what is now the Honors College. While the Honors College itself wasn’t established until 2008, much of Miller’s perspective, and his career since, have been typified by key elements of the Honors College approach to lifetime education.  RAND3.jpeg

“One of the things that helped me the most has been learning how to approach research,” he said. “Getting bit by the research bug in the first place was something that happened at Purdue as a result of close relationships I had with professors while I was there. Those relationships guided me into research and how to do it successfully.”

Those skills would come in useful at RAND, where he now works as an economist.  The RAND Corporation is a non-profit, non-partisan research organization which conducts independent studies, frequently with an eye toward providing information to decision-makers in public policy. 

Rudin’s (Multidisciplinary Engineering, ’19) story is similar in many ways.  In addition to research, she emphasized the leadership opportunities that Purdue’s rich landscape of student organizations brought to her experience - experience she says played a part in preparing her for collaborative research at the RAND Corporation, where she would eventually arrive as a research assistant and then become a research administrator. As a student at Purdue, she was president of the student organization iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) and was also a student ambassador for the College of Engineering.

“I really valued my leadership in student organizations,” she said. “It was valuable to have this experience where we have no external pressure - no grade or class we have to pass - and we’re just trying to produce an end product together successfully.” 

Nearly 10 years after Miller’s graduation, opportunities for collaboration emerged.  Miller had been working at RAND since 2015. Shortly after Rudin, a fellow Boilermaker, arrived as a research assistant in 2019, Miller was forming a team to conduct research on the impact of inventions - a project he knew Rudin would be a perfect fit for.

In this particular research project, the Lemelson-MIT Program and the Lemelson Foundation asked RAND to measure the value provided to society by the inventions of recipients of the Lemelson-MIT Prize. From 1995 to 2019, this annual $500,000 prize was awarded to a mid-career inventor whose work offered a significant value to society, improved lives and communities, and had been adopted or had a high probability of being adopted for practical use.  Tracing the impacts of these prize winners’ inventions was far from simple - the 26 prize recipients had collectively amassed 1,178 patents, and that’s only including those already attained at the point that they received the prize.

With contributions ranging from economics to engineering to political science, the research is nothing if not multidisciplinary. The results gave the researchers a more comprehensive view of the impact of inventions, and deeper insights into what’s required for an invention to be truly impactful. Namely, the need for collaboration and a support system in order for an invention to succeed. 

“Someone might have invented something really cool but if they didn’t have the support to launch it into a successful business, then the impacts might not be reflected in a dollar value of production,” Rudin said. “So that made the challenge very interesting to also come up with other metrics that weren’t necessarily tied to the business or the economic implications of what they created.”

“One of the implications of this study is that it’s important for everyone to be given the opportunities and support to pursue invention,” Miller said. “These examples of the potential benefits invention show that addressing known inequities in who becomes an inventor is good not only for those aspiring inventors, but also for the economy and the country and the world as a whole.” 

The document is available for free on RAND’s website and can be accessed here.