Knowing Me, Knowing You: Inventor Mobility and the Formation of Technology-Oriented Alliances

Abstract

Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.

Microfoundations of R&D Alliance Formation: The Interplay of Scientist Mobility and the Cooperative Context of Collaboration

“…Our findings also replicate in a new context findings in recent research about the facilitative role of scientist mobility for R&D alliance formation (Wagner and Goossen 2018). Whereas that research focused on scientist mobility between the largest global pharmaceutical companies, we show how the mobility of scientists shapes opportunities for R&D alliances among high-tech new ventures in the biotechnology industry.…”

“…Our study offers several contributions to the literature. Whereas previous alliance research primarily attends to the cooperative context of collaboration by emphasizing the role of relational and geographic embeddedness (e.g., Gulati 1995b; Gulati and Gargiulo 1999;Narula and Santangelo 2009), we emphasize scientist mobility in the factor market and show that it not only influences ventures' likelihood of allying (Wagner and Goossen 2018), but it also alters the implications of interfirm ties and colocation emphasized in previous research. The fact that scientist mobility and, interfirm ties or colocation, may substitute for one another in fostering R&D alliances suggests that future research needs to attend to the competitive labor market context of collaboration rather than only the cooperative context, just as emerging research on labor market mobility needs to devote more attention to the cooperative context of collaboration and firms' embeddedness.…”

“…They can therefore be an important mechanism for new ventures to discover opportunities for R&D collaboration and make partner selection decisions (Wagner and Goossen 2018).…”

“…To answer this research question, we rely on emerging research on the information-intermediation role of scientist mobility and its role in fostering interorganizational arrangements between firms (Collet and Hedström 2013;Mawdsley and Somaya 2016;Wagner and Goossen 2018). Mobile scientific personnel carry fine-grained information about firms' technological activities and are likely to be valuable for high-tech ventures to learn about external opportunities (Hess and Rothaermel 2011).…”

“…The informational role of mobile scientists can help us better understand the micro-foundations of alliance formation involving high-tech ventures (Salvato et al 2017). Recent research by Wagner and Goossen (2018) has demonstrated that mobile scientists can be instrumental in facilitating R&D alliances between their current and prior employers. In our study, we build upon and extend this research by developing the idea that scientist mobility is an important micro-organizational mechanism that can offset the absence of interfirm ties and geographic colocation in a venture's cooperative context.…”