The role of human capital: Evidence from corporate innovation

Abstract

This paper examines the distinct roles played by inventors and firms in contributing to corporate innovation. Inventors are six to eight times as important as firms in contributing to innovation performance as measured by patent and citation counts, but their importance is about the same in innovation strategies as captured by patent exploratory and exploitative scores. Furthermore, when labor mobility is reduced, the relative importance of firms to inventors in contributing to innovation strategy increases. Additional tests suggest that our main findings are unlikely driven by endogenous matching between firms and inventors.