Educational Backgrounds in Inventor Teams: The Role of Complementarities between Academic and Vocational Education in Team Performance

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: This paper analyzes whether inventor teams composed of members with diverse educational backgrounds, both academic and vocational, exhibit higher performance than teams with the same educational backgrounds. To exploit the different educational backgrounds among patent inventors in Switzerland, we construct a unique dataset of 35,486 inventors. This dataset links individual patenting activities from European Patent Office data from 1980-2021, with detailed biographical information obtained from LinkedIn. Using a supermodularity framework to assess complementarity, we find that inventor teams composed of members with academic and vocational backgrounds (as opposed to members with the same background) achieve higher team performance, measured by the quality of their jointly filed patents. This complementarity is even stronger in teams with at least one team member from a University of Applied Sciences. Further analysis reveals heterogeneous effects across technological fields. Overall, our findings show the importance of strategically combining different educational backgrounds in inventor teams, thereby highlighting the value of maintaining a balanced educational landscape.

Keywords: team productivity; inventor biographies; vocational education; patent quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I26 M54 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ipr and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0248_lhwpaper.pdf (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:iso:educat:0248

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sara Brunner ().