This study investigates the effects of rewards in a research and development (R&D) setting in which employees’ inventive efforts lead to patented inventions. Pay for performance (PFP) for inventions ...is associated with two challenges: Low-quality inventions may be rewarded (false positives), and high-quality inventions may be overlooked (false negatives). Building on previous findings regarding the motivational and informational effects of rewards, we use social identity theory to predict that different types of inventors react differently to such false positive and false negative information. Specifically, we hypothesize that PFP that produces false positives has detrimental effects on corporate inventors with a taste for science, who are motivated by scientific prestige, reputation, and intellectual curiosity. The empirical results from survey data related to 3,995 inventor–patent pairs show that, for this particular group of inventors, false positives are associated with reduced effort in research activities and fewer interactions with peers in the R&D department. In addition, these effects are stronger when firms have many patents and thus provide less noisy information to corporate inventors.
This paper discusses the role of education in shaping the geographical breadth of knowledge spillovers. Data pertaining to 6,051 European inventions reveal that inventors with a high level of ...education, such as a university or doctoral degree, rely more on external spillovers regardless of the geographical location of their sources. Controlling for this effect, they also access geographically wider knowledge spillovers. This result holds after controlling for alternative explanations, such as the inventors' network and the site where the research is performed. By contributing to individual openness, education thus provides a means to break through geographical barriers to attain knowledge diffusion.
By using a sample of 793 inventors drawn from the PatVal-EU dataset, this paper explores three aspects of patent production at the individual inventor level: (1) the number of EPO patents that the ...inventors produce; (2) the average value of their inventions; (3) the production of the most valuable patents. By jointly estimating the three equations we find that the inventors’ level of education, employment in a large firm, and involvement in large-scale research projects positively correlate with
quantity. Yet, apart from the size of the research project, none of these factors
directly influence the expected
value of the inventions. They do, however, have an
indirect influence, as we find that the number of patents explains the probability of producing a technological hit (the maximum value). Also, there is no regression to the mean in the invention process at an individual level, as the number of inventions that an inventor produces is not correlated with the average value.
Based on a survey of the inventors of 9017 European patented inventions, this paper provides new information about the characteristics of European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the ...importance of formal and informal collaborations, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of the patents.
Research Summary
This study investigates the importance of early life training for people's leadership roles later in the workplace. We focus on team leaders in industrial research and analyze ...changes in team leadership after the abandonment of the military draft by the United States in 1973. This policy produced a twofold effect on leadership training opportunities: it eliminated the training provided during the draft and reduced the incentives to pursue long‐term education to defer conscription. Our results show a decrease in the probability of team leadership for men subject to the policy change. This effect, which is likely explained by the education channel, reduces over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for the formation of human capital to fulfill strategic leadership roles.
Managerial Summary
The progressive shift toward team‐based innovation practices puts organizations in need of new leaders. Whether leaders can be trained as such is, however, a controversial topic. We argue that one can learn to become a leader through life‐changing experiences. Our results show that people who undergo pervasive leadership‐enhancing opportunities early in life have higher chances of fulfilling leadership positions later in the workplace. Therefore, our study calls for the provision of early life, inclusive leadership enhancing opportunities to shape leadership attitudes and capabilities. These include formal education, corporate internships, and on‐the‐job training but could also span to other domains, such as political activism, associationism, and sporting activities.
This study examines differences in income and job performance between women and men in creative, highly skilled jobs tasked with achieving technological inventions. By building on data pertaining to ...9,692 inventors from 23 countries, this study shows that female inventors represent only 4.2% of total inventors, and they earn about 14% less than their male peers. The gap persists even when controlling for sources of heterogeneity, the selection of inventors into types of jobs and tasks, and potential parenthood, instrumented by exploiting a source of variation related to religious practices. The income gap is not associated with differences in the quality of the inventions that female and male inventors produce. Thus, even in this human capital–intensive profession, where capabilities and education are important assets, and productivity differentials can be observed, women earn less than men, though they contribute to the development of high-quality inventions as much as men do.
This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation
.
Research Summary
This research addresses firms' use of external knowledge sources to develop patented inventions and explores the validity of patent citations as an indicator of interfirm knowledge ...flows. By comparing patent citations with primary data reported by the inventors, we uncover systematic measurement errors in patent citations and show that they depend on the firms' patent strategies (e.g., to reduce the risk of imitation or litigation), the source of knowledge employed (e.g., competitors, users), the technology of the underlying invention, and the institutional characteristics of the patent system. Our findings about the role of these factors in external knowledge sourcing and citing propensity highlight the importance of firms' strategic behavior and offer novel insights for the use of patent citations as an indicator of knowledge flows.
Managerial Summary
Firms' open innovation strategies rely on the sourcing of knowledge from other organizations. Tracing these knowledge flows is difficult, such that the empirical research on this matter typically uses citations that patents make to prior art in order to track them. However, patent citations might be added also for reasons other than the actual transfer of knowledge. We use primary information from a large survey of inventors to assess the accuracy of patent citations to measure knowledge flows, and we find evidence of measurement errors that depend on the applicants' patent strategies, the type of knowledge sources used, the filing jurisdiction, and the technology of the underlying invention. We offer insights to evaluate the settings in which patent citations are a reliable measure of knowledge flows.
This study investigates whether an increase in the demand for nonconventional work schedules helps explain the gender gap in career advancement. We look at employees of U.S. firms acquired between ...2010 and 2014 and distinguish between same and different time-zone acquisitions. The idea is that time-zone differences between the headquarters and the newly acquired firm increase the demand for and value of working outside the standard working schedule. This, combined with social norms about women’s role as caregivers, puts female employees at a disadvantage relative to men. Based on Zephyr-LinkedIn matched data, our results show that women are about 9.5% less likely than men to be promoted in cross-time-zone acquisitions than in same-time-zone acquisitions. The gap rises to 10.6% for managerial occupations, and it is higher for time-zone differences of two and three hours. We discuss the implications of our results for the management, evaluation, and retention of human capital in organizations and, more generally, for gender equality in the workplace. Funding: The authors thank the Editor and three autonomous referees for their comments on previous drafts of the paper. The authors also thank participants to the Strategy Science Virtual Conference 2020, the Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SIE) Virtual Seminars held in December 2020, the Wharton Technology and Innovation Conference 2021, and the Work and Organization Workshop held in Madrid in May 2022. The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Invernizzi Center for Research on Innovation, Organization, Strategy and Entrepreneurship (ICRIOS) at Bocconi University. S. Breschi also acknowledges financial support through the MUSA – Multilayered Urban Sustainability Action ECS 000037 and the GRINS – Growing Resilient, INclusive and Sustainable PE00000018 projects, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17685 .
This research investigates the role of parents in explaining the surprisingly low presence of women among inventors despite their increase among graduates from science, technology, engineering and ...mathematics (STEM) subjects. With Danish registry data on the population born between 1966 and 1985 and an experimental setting crafted on siblings’ gender composition, we find that the transmission of inventorship from parents to children disfavors daughters if they have a (second-born) brother. We complement this analysis with evidence about the role of parental factors at different stages of children’s education. Overall, our results confirm that parental role models matter for children’s education, especially at early stages and, through this, increase the probability of a child’s becoming an inventor. However, the direct transmission of inventorship that favors boys much more than girls seems to be affected by gendered expectations developed by parents about daughters’ and sons’ returns from inventorship. Our study contributes to explaining who becomes an inventor and why by adding an important boundary condition to the literature: Parents are intermediaries who, based on their own interpretation of external information about inventive jobs, contribute to create or limit opportunities for their children.
This paper was accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations.
Funding:
The authors got financial funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation in the course of the project “Investments, incentives, and the impact of Danish research (Triple-I-Research)” Grant NNF16OC0021444.
Supplemental Material:
Data files and the online appendix are available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4432
.
This study examines whether inventors’ past stock of inventions affects the rate at which they produce technological breakthroughs, as well as the role of organizational contingencies in moderating ...this effect. The breakthrough rate depends on the rate at which an inventor generates inventions and the probability that each of these inventions is a breakthrough. We argue that inventors with larger patent records generate a higher rate of inventions, but the single inventions that they generate each have a lower probability of being a breakthrough. Longitudinal data of 5,144 European inventors and fixed-effects estimation confirm these predictions and reveal that the net effect of the inventors’ stock of past inventions on the breakthrough rate is positive—that is, more established inventors display a higher rate of breakthroughs than brand-new inventors. We also confirm the role of organizational contexts in shaping inventors’ productivity. In particular, firms’ control over research and development targets lessens the advantage of established inventors with regard to the rate of breakthrough generation.
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