The renaissance of the "renaissance man"?: specialists vs. generalists in teams of inventors

Eduardo Melero and Neus Palomeras

IC3JM - Estudios = Working Papers from Instituto Mixto Carlos III - Juan March de Ciencias Sociales (IC3JM)

Abstract: Is there a role for the multifaceted Renaissance Man in modern team-intensive innovation activities? This paper argues that researchers with broad knowledge, also known as generalists, make an especially valuable contribution to innovation teams. Given the re-combinative nature of technological progress, innovation results depend crucially on the skilful matching of different pieces of knowledge. The presence of generalists in innovation teams makes the knowledge recombination process more effective, even if this comes at the cost of reduced knowledge depth. Moreover, typical barriers in team processes become less acute with the presence of generalists. We analyze the role of generalists versus specialists in innovation teams by tracking the trajectories of inventors in the electrical and electronics industry through their patenting activity. Our findings suggest that innovation teams with the contribution of generalists outperform those that rely on a diverse set of specialists

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/rest/api/core/bitstreams ... e6964cb3b7b0/content (application/pdf)

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:cte:imrepe:id-12-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IC3JM - Estudios = Working Papers from Instituto Mixto Carlos III - Juan March de Ciencias Sociales (IC3JM)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ana Poveda ().