Researchers have made significant progress in understanding the role of geography in innovation and firm strategy (e.g., Alcácer & Chung, 2007; Audretsch & Feldman, 1996; Porter, 1998; Saxenian, 1996; Shaver & Flyer, 2000; Sorenson and Baum, 2003). Recently, scholars have shown renewed interest in understanding how geography affects inventors and firms, paying increasing attention to its relation to issues such as gender inequality (Ghani, Kerr & O’Connell, 2013; Sorenson & Dahl, 2016), regional dynamics (Safford, 2009; Wang, Madhok & Li, 2014), intellectual property litigation (Alcácer, Beukel, & Cassiman, 2017; Beukel & Zhao, 2018), and political uncertainty (Cerqueiro, Mão-de-Ferro, & Penas, 2019; Jens, 2017). This symposium aims to extend this conversation by including four empirical studies that explore the following questions: 1) How does geography affect the inventor gender gap (i.e., female vs. male inventor activity)? 2) How do the dynamics of industry clusters (i.e., the patterns of growth or decline) affect the novelty of firm innovation? 3) Why is patent litigation so geographically concentrated across countries? and 4) How does political risk affect firms’ decision to locate in the center of power (i.e., the capital city)? We expect that this symposium will encourage cross-fertilization of ideas between different literatures in management and between literatures in management and other fields. The Role of Location on the Inventor Gender Gap: Are Women Geographically Constrained? Presenter: Mercedes Delgado; Copenhagen Business School and MIT Presenter: Luca Gius; MIT Presenter: Myriam Mariani; Bocconi U. Presenter: Fiona Murray; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cluster Dynamics, Employee Mobility, and Novelty of Firms’ Technological Innovation Presenter: Min Jung Kim; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Presenter: J. Myles Shaver; U. of Minnesota Why is Patent Litigation Geographically Concentrated? Presenter: Minyuan Zhao; Washington U. in St. Louis, Olin Business School Presenter: Shixiang Wang; Zhejiang U. Locating in the Center of Power: Washington DC Headquarters as a Political Strategy Presenter: Jing Deng; U. of Colorado, Boulder
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