The antecedents of green technologies: ethnic inventors and recombinant capabilities

Abstract

We draw upon the micro-foundation of recombinant knowledge in GTs, the international business literature on the firms’ strategies for external knowledge sourcing and the most recent strain of migration studies in the innovation field to explore the role of ethnic migrants in leveraging recombinant creation dynamics and increasing the probability of successful green innovations. Our main argument is that the involvement of ethnic inventors increases the likelihood to successfully generate green inventions, due to their inherent experiences and distinct knowledge bases and experiences might enhance creativity (Parrotta et al., 2014) and complex problem solving (Cooke and Kemeny, 2017). We rely on data drawn from the ethnic patenting database, which covers harmonized USPTO patent records granted to US-based MNEs over the period 1975-2009 as designed by Kerr (2008), merged with information on the career of each inventor in the sample derived from the Harvard Patent Dataverse database (Lai et al., 2011). We find that teams composed of inventors with wider recombinant capabilities also tend to have a higher propensity of developing new green technologies. Also, a higher level of ethnic diversity among the US-based inventors correlates with a higher probability of patenting GTs, but the relationship follows a non-linear pattern along ethnic diversity. Finally, we ?nd that patents developed by R&D teams involving a higher degree of ethnic diversity among their domestic inventors are more likely to combine technological knowledge in a novel way to develop GTs. Our results bring implications for the strategic management of inventors’ teams by multinationals willing to run the green patent race and for policy-makers facing the climate change challenges.