Collaborative Research: Inter-Industry Differences in the Antecedents and Consequences of Industrial Scientists Mobility and Entrepreneurship Decisions

This research examines inter-industry differences in the antecedents and consequences of industrial scientists' mobility and entrepreneurship decisions. Three questions are analyzed 1) Why do some high technology industries have higher rates of scientist mobility and entrepreneurship than others? 2) What are the innovation diffusion patterns across high technology industries due to mobility and entrepreneurial entry of scientific personnel? 3) How do industry characteristics interact with firm and individual attributes to impact employment growth of new ventures created by industrial scientists?

The project centers on the role of complementary assets and posits that inter-industry differences in their importance play a critical role in explaining industry heterogeneity in the rates and outcomes of industrial scientist mobility and entrepreneurship decisions and thus serve as the theoretical underpinnings for all three research questions. A particular focus is on inter-industry differences in the importance and transportability of complementary non-human assets, how they shape the career decisions of individual scientists, and how they affect both the levels of scientist mobility and entrepreneurship within industries and the direction of scientist mobility and entrepreneurship that occurs across industry boundaries. The empirical analysis of the data focuses on scientists working in high-tech industry settings tracks scientists? entrepreneurship and mobility within and between these high-tech sectors.

Intellectual Merit: In contrast to most of the prior literature that studied the antecedents and consequences of the career choices of scientists at the firm level and within a single industry context, this research examines the questions by focusing on individual level decisions in a broad cross-industry setting. This thus examines multiple important gaps that are of interest to both policy makers and academics. In particular, by building the micro-foundations of the knowledge diffusion process at the individual scientist unit of analysis, it helps to build a systematic understanding of inter-industry differences in industrial scientist mobility and entrepreneurship in high tech industries. Understanding industry heterogeneity in the antecedents and consequences of the career choices of industrial scientists is particularly important in the context of understanding and promoting industry renewal as scientists are likely to play a key role in the creation and commercialization of new technologies which can have important growth effects at the firm-, industry-, and regional-level.

Broader Impacts: The study informs science and innovation policy makers about what industry conditions are most conducive to employment growth via entrepreneurship by scientific personnel. In addition, it examines the results of incentivizing a potentially crucial but heretofore under-examined source of high tech entrepreneurship: scientists employed outside of the focal industry. The results may also inform scientists' career decisions about industry-level factors that may facilitate or create impediments to successful start-up entry and subsequent growth.