Context Factors and the Performance of Mobile Individuals in Research Teams

Abstract

We use survey data for 4,336 scientific teams, located in 16 countries, where all members were working within a single lab, to test three context factors that potentially affect the capability of internationally mobile individuals to enhance the innovation performance of their research units. We formulate hypotheses on context factors rooted in the knowledge recombination and learning-by hiring theories. The results show that three context factors are positively associated with international mobility and the performance of the research units: the degree to which knowledge in the relevant subfield of science is geographically concentrated, the creative intent of the activities performed and the decision power of the mobile individual.

Talent goes to global cities: The world network of scientists’ mobility

“…(2017) ; Fink et al. (2017) ; Franzoni, Scellato, Stephan, 2012 , Franzoni, Scellato, Stephan, 2014 and Franzoni et al. (2018) , among others.…”

Theories from the Lab: How Research on Science Commercialization can Contribute to Management Studies

“…This literature has mostly addressed how science-based teams behave and perform. In particular, within-team coordination costs (Kotha et al, 2013) and innovation capability (Jain, 2013), as well as international teams' mobility behaviours (Franzoni et al, 2018) and productivity (Gittelman, 2007), have been linked to team-level outcomes.…”

Knowledge Worker Mobility in Context: Pushing the Boundaries of Theory and Methods

“…We summarize the papers in the Special Issue in Table I. The papers reflect the different contextual dimensions of mobility, sometimes covering more than one aspect: organizational (Rocha, Carneiro and Varum, 2017;Park, Howard, and Gomulya, 2017;Brymer and Sirmon, 2017); geographical and spatial (Franzoni, Scellato and Stephan, 2017); social (Brymer and Sirmon, 2017;Daniel, DiDomenico and Nunan, 2017); and institutional and cultural (Rocha, Carneiro and Varum, 2017;Ejermo and Schubert, 2017;Franzoni, Scellato and Stephan, 2017).…”

“…These results suggest that, in certain contexts (e.g., pusheddriven startups), hiring former coworkers may be a choice partly driven by necessity, which may reduce the quality of initial human resources, and, consequently, limit future growth prospects, especially in rigid labor markets. learning-by-hiring theory (Franzoni, Scellato and Stephan, 2017;Park, Howard, and Gomulya, 2017), theory on mobility to spinoffs (Rocha, Carneiro and Varum, 2017), utility theory and matching theory in labour markets (Ejermo and Schubert, 2017), and context-emergent turnover (CET) theory (Brymer and Sirmon, 2017). The articles that we publish here also provide strong methodological contributions by incorporating a variety of methods and datasets including econometric modelling of firmlevel spin-off data (Rocha, Carneiro and Varum, 2017) or post-acquisition patent data (Park, Howard, and Gomulya, 2017), and large team-level, cross-country survey datasets (Franzoni, Scellato and Stephan, 2017).…”

“…learning-by-hiring theory (Franzoni, Scellato and Stephan, 2017;Park, Howard, and Gomulya, 2017), theory on mobility to spinoffs (Rocha, Carneiro and Varum, 2017), utility theory and matching theory in labour markets (Ejermo and Schubert, 2017), and context-emergent turnover (CET) theory (Brymer and Sirmon, 2017). The articles that we publish here also provide strong methodological contributions by incorporating a variety of methods and datasets including econometric modelling of firmlevel spin-off data (Rocha, Carneiro and Varum, 2017) or post-acquisition patent data (Park, Howard, and Gomulya, 2017), and large team-level, cross-country survey datasets (Franzoni, Scellato and Stephan, 2017). In addition to analyses of novel firm-level and team-level data, other studies in this special issue investigate their research questions using individual-level data such as the employer-employee dataset of Swedish inventors (Ejermo and Schubert, 2017), and the data of partners in US based law firms (Brymer and Sirmon, 2017).…”