 Key inventors, teams and firm performance: The Italian caseMauro Rota, Francesco Schettino and Luca Spinesi Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2017, vol. 42, issue C, 13-25 Abstract: This paper investigates the existence and nature of knowledge-spillovers at the micro-level and, in turn, the capacity of firms to absorb new ideas generated in R&D laboratories. It evaluates the merits for a firm of attracting or retaining “key” inventors, or assembling a wide team of inventors. First, using the EPO-OECD data, we identify “key” and “normal” inventors by means of the Hill’s estimator. Then, we test the hypothesis that the presence of one “key” inventor in a firm’s R&D laboratory would have a positive effect on the Italian firms output. Our results are threefold: 1) the patent portfolio positively affects the value of production; 2) the simple presence of “key” inventors in a R&D laboratory does not significantly affect the output; 3) for a given number of patent applications by firm, a less concentrated patents distribution across inventors employed in the same R&D laboratory makes a positive impact on the production. Keywords: Patents; Inventive productivity; Firm performance; Hill’s estimator (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:streco:v:42:y:2017:i:c:p:13-25 DOI: 10.1016/j.strueco.2017.05.002 Access Statistics for this article Structural Change and Economic Dynamics is currently edited by F. Duchin, H. Hagemann, M. Landesmann, R. Scazzieri, A. Steenge and B. Verspagen More articles in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics from Elsevier |
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