The Strategic Allocation of Inventors to R&D Collaborations

Abstract

Safeguarding against unintended leakage of valuable knowledge in R&D collaboration requires careful attention to the role of inventors participating in these collaborations. In this paper, we claim that the degree of protection of the knowledge embodied by inventors affects how an opportunistic partner can use this information when technology leakage occurs. The implication is that those inventors whose set of knowledge is more protected are more likely to be assigned to joint activities than their co-workers. By relying on ownership and authorship data of patents, we analyse the allocation of inventors to collaborative projects from a sample of large pharmaceutical firms. Our results confirm that inventors are strategically allocated into projects according to their degree of preemptive power.