Inventors' Mobility and Organizations' Productivity: Evidence from Japanese rare name inventors

This paper investigates the relationship between inventors' mobility and organizations' productivity by constructing a database of patent inventors. We focus on inventors with rare names in order to avoid the problem of identifying distinct inventors with the same name. Tracing the inventors' transfers between organizations, we find the following. First, mobile inventors are more productive than stable inventors who have never transferred. Second, inventors with higher ex ante productivity have a higher frequency of transfers, while the effect of transfers on their ex post productivity for productive inventors is the opposite compared with that of less productive inventors. Thus, ex ante productivity may explain a large part of the higher productivity of mobile inventors relative to stable inventors. Third, the productivity of stable inventors is higher in an organization where inventors have more experience in different organizations. These results suggest the existence of knowledge spillover from mobile inventors to stable inventors, which leads to organizations' high productivity.

[1]  Dries Faems,et al.  R&D manpower and technological performance: The impact of demographic and task-related diversity , 2013 .

[2]  Lori Rosenkopf,et al.  Overcoming Local Search Through Alliances and Mobility , 2003, Manag. Sci..

[3]  R. Grant.  Toward a Knowledge-Based Theory of the Firm,” Strategic Management Journal (17), pp. , 1996 .

[4]  G. Peri,et al.  Cities and Cultures , 2004, World Scientific Studies in International Economics.

[5]  Joon-Oh Park,et al.  The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge , 2011 .

[6]  Hélène Delerue,et al.  Job mobility restriction mechanisms and appropriability in organizations: The mediating role of secrecy and lead time , 2010 .

[7]  Pierpaolo Parrotta,et al.  The nexus between labor diversity and firm’s innovation , 2012, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[8]  Masahisa Fujita,et al.  Culture and diversity in knowledge creation , 2012 .

[9]  Katrin Hussinger,et al.  Absorptive capacity and post-acquisition inventor productivity , 2012 .

[10]  Morten T. Hansen,et al.  The Search-Transfer Problem: The Role of Weak Ties in Sharing Knowledge across Organization Subunits , 1999 .

[11]  Koen Frenken,et al.  The Evolution of Inventor Networks in the silicon Valley and Boston Regions , 2007, Adv. Complex Syst..

[12]  Giovanni Peri,et al.  The Economic Value of Cultural Diversity: Evidence from Us Cities , 2004 .

[13]  G. George,et al.  Innovating in the periphery: The impact of local and foreign inventor mobility on the value of Indian patents , 2012 .

[14]  Manuel Trajtenberg,et al.  'Names Game': Harnessing Inventors Patent Data for Economic Research , 2006 .

[15]  Nobuyuki Hanaki,et al.  The Effect of Collaboration Network on Inventors' Job Match, Productivity and Tenure , 2009 .

[16]  B. Kogut,et al.  Localization of Knowledge and the Mobility of Engineers in Regional Networks , 1999 .

[17]  Vetle I. Torvik,et al.  Disambiguation and co-authorship networks of the U.S. patent inventor database (1975–2010) , 2014 .

[18]  Kari Kristinsson,et al.  Does a different view create something new? The effect of employee diversity on innovation , 2011 .

[19]  J. Sylvan Katz,et al.  Geographical proximity and scientific collaboration , 1994, Scientometrics.

[20]  Karin Hoisl,et al.  Tracing mobile inventors—The causality between inventor mobility and inventor productivity , 2007 .

[21]  Morten T. Hansen,et al.  KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN ORGANIZATIONS: MULTIPLE NETWORKS, MULTIPLE PHASES , 2005 .

[22]  The effect of researcher mobility on organizational R & D performance : researcher mobility and innovation , 2014 .

[23]  Yasusada Murata,et al.  Localized Knowledge Spillovers and Patent Citations: A Distance-Based Approach , 2014, Review of Economics and Statistics.