WHEN KNOWLEDGE WALKS OUT THE DOOR: A LONGITUDINAL EXAMINATION OF INVENTORS’ MOBILITY ACROSS FIRMS

While highlighting the knowledge leakage that occurs when inventors move to a rival firm, extant literature has paid less attention to the factors that drive inventors’ mobility in the first place. This paper shows that collaborations across inventors and across geographically-dispersed R&D units of the firm contribute to increasing inventors’ propensity to move to a rival firm. While prior research has shown that the aggregation of knowledge across inventors and across locations helps the firm deter imitation, this study, in contrast, demonstrates that such knowledge aggregation may induce the firm’s inventors to walk out the door with important knowledge.