Florenta Teodoridis

Does Knowledge Accumulation Increase the Returns to Collaboration

We examine the role of knowledge accumulation in explaining the increase in research team size over time by exploiting the collapse of the USSR as an instrument that led to the sudden release of previously hidden research. We examine changes over time in the propensity of non-Soviet mathematicians to collaborate in fields in which Soviet research was strong to fields in which Soviet research was weak. We find that coauthorship increased disproportionately in Soviet-rich subfields after 1990. Furthermore, consistent with the hypothesized mechanism, scholars in Soviet-rich subfields disproportionately increased citations to Soviet prior art. These scholars also became increasingly specialized.

Generalists, Specialists, and the Direction of Inventive Activity

Due to the cumulative nature of innovation, access to knowledge is important. Although evidence exists concerning the positive impact of increased knowledge access on the rate of inventive activity, less is known about its influence on the direction of inventive activity. I examine how a change in the cost of access to knowledge influences inventive activity by exploiting the hack of Microsoft Kinect as an exogenous event resulting in a sudden and unexpected reduction in the cost of motion-sensing research technology. Specifically, I examine changes in the publication rate of academic papers that use motion-sensing keywords and the composition of authorship on these papers before and after the launch of Kinect relative to other academic publications in selected control subfields of electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics. Despite a growing emphasis on the importance of specialists for knowledge creation, I identify researchers with broader exposure to knowledge – generalists – as playing a particularly important role in the process through which this shock influenced inventive activity. First, generalists have a higher propensity than specialists to respond to opportunities for knowledge creation enabled by the reduction in cost of motion-sensing technology. Second, generalists play a central role in connecting non-motion-sensing specialists to these opportunities, thus influencing the direction of inventive activity.

Understanding Team Knowledge Production: The Interrelated Roles of Technology and Expertise

Teamwork is an increasingly important aspect of knowledge production. In particular, factors influencing team formation relative to the composition of expertise are crucial for both organizational performance and for informing policy. In this paper, I draw attention to technology access as a highly influential factor impacting expertise in team formation. I examine the hack of Microsoft Kinect as an exogenous event that suddenly reduced motion-sensing technology costs. I show that great reductions in technology costs substitute for ex ante optimal involvement of area specialists and facilitate involvement of outside-area specialists through collaboration with researchers with broader knowledge—generalists. In other words, technology costs influence the composition of expertise in teamwork, with sufficiently large reductions leading to knowledge creation that combines more broadly across knowledge areas. These findings have important implications for organizations and policy makers in crafting incentives f...

Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast- and Slow-paced Domains*:

Using the impact of the Soviet Union’s collapse on the performance of theoretical mathematicians as a natural experiment, we attempt to resolve the controversy in prior research on whether specialists or generalists have superior creative performance. While many have highlighted generalists’ advantage due to access to a wider set of knowledge components, others have underlined the benefits that specialists can derive from their deep expertise. We argue that this disagreement might be partly driven by the fact that the pace of change in a knowledge domain shapes the relative return from being a specialist or a generalist. We show that generalist scientists performed best when the pace of change was slower and their ability to draw from diverse knowledge domains was an advantage in the field, but specialists gained advantage when the pace of change increased and their deeper expertise allowed them to use new knowledge created at the knowledge frontier. We discuss and test the roles of cognitive mechanisms and of competition for scarce resources. Specifically, we show that specialists became more desirable collaborators when the pace of change was faster, but when the pace of change was slower, generalists were more sought after as collaborators. Overall, our results highlight trade-offs associated with specialization for creative performance.

The Cost of Research Tools and the Direction of Innovation: Evidence from Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Understanding the factors that affect the rate and direction of technical change has been a central aim of research in the study of science and innovation for more than a half-century. Although substantial evidence exists regarding the policies and institutions that affect the rate of knowledge accumulation, substantially less is known about factors that affect the direction of inventive activity. We examine how a change in the cost of access to knowledge influences the direction of inventive activity by exploiting the hack of Microsoft Kinect as an exogenous event that resulted in a sudden, unexpected, and substantial reduction in the cost of motion-sensing research technology. To estimate whether this shock induces changes in scientists’ research trajectories, we employ novel measures based on machine learning (topic modeling) techniques as well as traditional measures based on bibliometric indicators of knowledge accumulation Our analysis demonstrates that the Kinect shock increases the diversity of research of both incumbents and entrants in motion-sensing and that the effect is greater for entrants than for incumbents. Importantly, the increase in diversification of entrants is not fully explained by diversification into motion-sensing. Rather, entrants diversify their research even in projects that do not directly use motion-sensing. Our results paint a picture in which a reduction in the cost of research tools increases the breadth of research activity, expanding the trajectories of scholars both inside and outside of the affected area.

Startup Commercialization Strategies of Disruptive Technologies: Implications for the Rate of Scientific Discovery

Startups rushing to market with potentially disruptive technologies have the potential to reduce the documented negative effect of private return incentives for scientific discovery (basic research). While it is optimal for startups of disruptive technologies to enter the market to validate their technology in order to enable options for other market transactions, this entry strategy influences industry’s innovation incentives as the revealed technology threatens the incumbents’ trajectory. Furthermore, given the uncertainty of such technologies - ambiguity regarding technology’s robust scientific likelihood to improve to reach its disruptive potential - innovations efforts unfold predominantly in the realm of scientific discovery, leading to an increase in the rate of basic research in the knowledge area of the technology. I provide evidence from efforts to develop and commercialize quantum computing.

Jack of All Trades and Master of Knowledge:The Role of Generalists in Novel Knowledge Integration

Organization-level knowledge diversification facilitates exploration – integration of external new knowledge –, yet knowledge accumulation poses a challenge because there is a trade-off between individual-level breadth and depth of knowledge. This leads to a need to coordinate larger teams in order to gather enough diverse expertise and capitalize on its benefits, a complex and costly process. As an alternative, we consider and show evidence of the role of individual-level diversification as a mechanism through which skilled researchers engage in successful exploration by utilizing the benefits of their breadth of knowledge and by mitigating the perceived disadvantages of their shallower depth of knowledge through diverse collaboration networks. Our results suggest that organizations seeking to innovate at the frontier should consider the benefits of hiring diverse researchers.

When Collaboration Bridges Institutions: The Impact of Industry Collaboration on Academic Productivity

Prior research suggests that academic scientists who collaborate with firms may experience lower publication rates in their collaborative lines of work due to industry’s insistence on intellectual property protection through patenting or secrecy. In contrast, we posit that university–industry collaboration can sometimes foster specialization and boost academic contribution to open science. Specifically, research lines with both scientific and commercial potential (i.e., in Pasteur’s quadrant) provide an opportunity for a productive division of tasks between academic scientists and their industry counterparts, whereby the former focus on exploiting the scientific opportunities and the latter focus on the commercial ones. The main empirical challenge of examining this proposition is that research projects that involve industry collaborators may be qualitatively different from those that do not. To address this issue, we exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries where multiple scientists make roughly the same discovery around the same time. Following a simultaneous discovery, we compare the follow-on research output of academic scientists who collaborated with industry on the discovery with that of academic scientists who did not. We find that academic scientists with industry collaborators produced more follow-on publications and fewer follow-on patents than did academic scientists without industry collaborators. This effect is particularly salient when the research line has important commercial implications and when the industry partner is an established firm.