Localization of Knowledge and the Mobility of Engineers in Regional Networks
Management Science
Recombinant Uncertainty in Technological Search
Management Science
Overcoming Local Search Through Alliances and Mobility
Management Science
Putting Patents in Context: Exploring Knowledge Transfer from MIT
Management Science
Collaborative Networks as Determinants of Knowledge Diffusion Patterns
Management Science
Management Science
Small Worlds and Regional Innovation
Organization Science
Mobility, Skills, and the Michigan Non-Compete Experiment
Management Science
Lone Inventors as Sources of Breakthroughs: Myth or Reality?
Management Science
Noncompete Covenants: Incentives to Innovate or Impediments to Growth
Management Science
Reconceptualizing Stars: Scientist Helpfulness and Peer Performance
Management Science
How does social software change knowledge management? Toward a strategic research agenda
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
Hi-index | 0.01 |
When firms recruit inventors, they acquire not only the use of their skills but also enhanced access to their stock of ideas. But do hiring firms actually increase their use of new recruits' prior inventions? Our estimates suggest they do, quite significantly in fact, by approximately 219% on average. However, this does not necessarily reflect widespread “learning by hiring.” In fact, we estimate that a recruit's exploitation of her own prior ideas accounts for almost half of the above effect, with much of the diffusion to others being limited to the recruit's immediate collaborative network. Furthermore, although one might expect the recruit's role to diminish rapidly as her tacit knowledge diffuses across her new firm, our estimates indicate that her importance is surprisingly persistent over time. We base these findings on an empirical strategy that exploits the variation over time in hiring firms' citations to the recruits' premove patents. Specifically, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to compare premove versus postmove citation rates for the recruits' prior patents and corresponding matched-pair control patents. Our methodology has three benefits compared to previous studies that also examine the link between labor mobility and knowledge flow: (1) it does not suffer from the upward bias inherent in the conventional cross-sectional comparison, (2) it generates results that are robust to a more stringently matched control sample, and (3) it enables a temporal examination of knowledge flow patterns. This paper was accepted by Kamalini Ramdas, entrepreneurship and innovation.