Bridging Academic and Vocational Human Capital in Inventor Teams: Implications for Inventor Team Productivity

Bastian Silvester Bruestle, Patrick Lehnert, Erik Buunk, Uschi Backes-Gellner and Dietmar Harhoff
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Bastian Silvester Brüstle

No 248, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: We examine the role of complementary types of human capital in inventor teams on the quality of their patents. We construct a dataset linking European Patent Office data to public LinkedIn profiles. We identify the human capital of patent inventors via their LinkedIn educational background information. Leveraging the different pathways in the Swiss education system, we distinguish among three types of human capital: academic, vocational, and hybrid (from an education pathway combining vocational practice and applied research). To assess the relationship between academic and vocational human capital, we use a supermodularity framework. We find that academic and vocational human capital are complementary for patent quality when at least one team member has hybrid human capital. This finding provides evidence that inventors with hybrid human capital act as a bridge between academic and vocational human capital by lowering communication costs, thereby enabling knowledge recombination and idea development. Overall, our findings show the importance of hybrid human capital to bridge different types of human capital for productivity in inventor teams.

Keywords: inventor biographies; team productivity; vocational education; patent quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-tid
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0248

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