Abstract
Inter-firm mobility of inventors is a major source of embodied knowledge transfer and receiving firms enjoy additional benefits from the collaboration networks of mobile inventors. However, there is still limited understanding on how the firm can maximize the impact of incoming inventors and what structure of co-inventor networks is the most beneficial for that. To answer this question, we construct a weighted and time-decayed co-inventor network from all IT-related patents in the harmonized OECD PATSTAT 1977–2010 database and analyze events of inter-firm inventor mobility. We look at the future impact of firm innovation and isolate the effect of mobile inventors’ network characteristics from the characteristics of the collaboration network in the receiving firm. Our results imply that high-impact innovations are produced if the firm hires broker inventors who have diverse networks and thus has the potential to channel a wide pool of knowledge into the firm. We find evidence that cohesive networks within the firm, measured by small world characteristics, exaggerate the effect of incoming brokers and high-impact inventors.
Highlights
The mobility of inventors has long been considered a major source of knowledge flow across inventing firms because they benefit from the tacit or embodied knowledge of incoming inventors (Almeida and Kogut 1999; Arrow 1962; Levin et al 1987; Palomeras and Melero 2010; Zucker et al 2002)
The estimations illustrate that patents assigned to firms receiving a new inventor in year 1995 receive 2.5 extra citations on average during the 3 years compared to patents assigned to control firms and this shift becomes stronger when we increase the time lag
A combination of difference-in-differences and pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) regression has been taken in this paper on patent data in the IT sector to assess the role of co-inventor networks on firmlevel innovation performance and the events of inter-firm mobility of inventors were used as channels of knowledge transfer between firms
Summary
The mobility of inventors has long been considered a major source of knowledge flow across inventing firms because they benefit from the tacit or embodied knowledge of incoming inventors (Almeida and Kogut 1999; Arrow 1962; Levin et al 1987; Palomeras and Melero 2010; Zucker et al 2002). Besides embodied knowledge and skills, incoming inventors establish new inter-firm ties by maintaining interaction with previous colleagues at distinct companies (Agrawal et al 2006; Breschi and Lissoni 2005, 2009). These social and professional connections can provide the hiring firm with additional access to external knowledge (Powell et al 1996) and are especially important when the research group must understand complex knowledge (Reagans and McEvily 2003; Sorenson et al 2006). We need to better understand what structures of collaboration networks firms benefit the most from when they hire new workers or inventors
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