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Innovation, Knowledge Flow, and Worker Mobility

TLDR
In this article, the authors present a dynamic contracting and matching model of the employment relationship between a firm and a worker (engineer) that provides an equilibrium explanation for high turnover in knowledge-driven industrial markets, showing that incompleteness of the contracting relationship makes it optimal for firms to adopt open R&D environments as a recruitment inducement when labor is in relatively short supply.
Abstract
In knowledge-driven industrial markets employee turnover is often quite high despite each firm’s interest in restricting knowledge flow resulting from employee departures. We present a dynamic contracting and matching model of the employment relationship between a firm and a worker (engineer) that provides an equilibrium explanation for high turnover. Incompleteness of the contracting relationship makes it optimal for firms to adopt open R&D environments as a recruitment inducement when labor is in relatively short supply. Such environments facilitate turnover. We examine how openness of R&D environments varies according to labor market conditions, expected quality of initial firm-employee match, legal protection of IP, and the longevity of the product cycle. These results are useful for understanding why geographic clusters often foster innovation.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

How) Do (Firms in) Clusters Create Knowledge

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the evidence for propositions regarding the knowledge enhancing qualities of clusters by reviewing the literature with the expressed intention of examining whether such claims in fact rest upon rigorous and verifiable empirical findings.
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When do Employees Become Entrepreneurs

TL;DR: The authors developed a multi-task incentives model to analyze optimal corporate strategies towards employee innovations, which explained when employees become entrepreneurs (sometimes even involuntarily); when they become intrapreneurs, managing internal ventures; when they became managers of a corporate spin-off; and when they are denied all of these options.
Journal ArticleDOI

When Do Employees Become Entrepreneurs

TL;DR: The authors examines an economic theory of when employees become entrepreneurs and whether these innovations are developed as internal ventures or outside the firm, and shows that if generating innovations distracts employees from their assigned tasks, firms may discourage innovation.
Posted Content

Optimal Project Rejection and New Firm Start-Ups

TL;DR: In this article, the authors claim that the start-up firm may seem more innovative than the established firm may because the comparative advantage of the startup firm is to commercialize 'innovative' projects, i.e. projects that do not fit with the established firms' existing assets.
Journal ArticleDOI

Optimal Project Rejection and New Firm Start-ups

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study the decision of an established firm to commercialize innovations and predict that innovations commercialised through internal ventures are characterized by a higher fit with the internal resources of the established firm, a higher cannibalization of the existing businesses, and a lower profitability than innovations commercialized through external ventures.
References
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Geographic Localization of Knowledge Spillovers as Evidenced by Patent Citations

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TL;DR: The functional source of innovation general patterns economic explanation shifting and predicting the sources of innovation innovation as a distributed process is discussed in this paper, where users as innovators are considered as the innovators.
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