Inter-firm inventor mobility and the role of co-inventor networks in producing high-impact innovation

Gergő Tóth and Balázs Lengyel
Additional contact information
Gergő Tóth: Hungarian Academy of Sciences

The Journal of Technology Transfer, 2021, vol. 46, issue 1, No 5, 117-137

Abstract: Abstract Inter-firm mobility of inventors is a major source of embodied knowledge transfer and receiving firms enjoy additional benefits from the collaboration networks of mobile inventors. However, there is still limited understanding on how the firm can maximize the impact of incoming inventors and what structure of co-inventor networks is the most beneficial for that. To answer this question, we construct a weighted and time-decayed co-inventor network from all IT-related patents in the harmonized OECD PATSTAT 1977–2010 database and analyze events of inter-firm inventor mobility. We look at the future impact of firm innovation and isolate the effect of mobile inventors’ network characteristics from the characteristics of the collaboration network in the receiving firm. Our results imply that high-impact innovations are produced if the firm hires broker inventors who have diverse networks and thus has the potential to channel a wide pool of knowledge into the firm. We find evidence that cohesive networks within the firm, measured by small world characteristics, exaggerate the effect of incoming brokers and high-impact inventors.

Keywords: Network constraint; Small world network; Patent citations; Predicted margins (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 J69 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10961-019-09758-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:jtecht:v:46:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s10961-019-09758-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/10961/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10961-019-09758-5

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Technology Transfer is currently edited by Albert N. Link, Donald S. Siegel, Barry Bozeman and Simon Mosey

More articles in The Journal of Technology Transfer from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().