Invention Quality and Entrepreneurial Earnings: The Role of Prior Employment Variety

Thomas Astebro and Kevyn Yong (yong@hec.fr)

No 1129, HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris

Abstract: We use creativity theory to analyze the effects of occupational job variety and industry variety on invention quality and entrepreneurial earnings. We test our ideas with survey data from 770 inventor-entrepreneurs who commercialized their own inventions. Results suggest that occupational and industry variety substitute for each other in positively affecting invention quality whereas a lack of industry variety is associated with greater entrepreneurial earnings. Results are consistent with the idea that high levels of both occupational and industry variety enables the generation and discovery of inventions, but these ideas are usually not technically feasible or financially viable.

Keywords: Creativity; Prior Employment Variety; Jack-of-all-Trades; Invention Quality; Entrepreneurial Earnings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2015-12-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-ind and nep-ino
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2709622 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Invention Quality and Entrepreneurial Earnings: The Role of Prior Employment Variety (2016)
Working Paper: Invention Quality and Entrepreneurial Earnings: The Role of Prior Employment Variety (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebg:heccah:1129

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris HEC Paris, 78351 Jouy-en-Josas cedex, France. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Antoine Haldemann (haldemann@hec.fr).