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Research indicates that particularly senior women often get undervalued in academia, from hitting glass ceilings to receiving less recognition for accomplishments than male peers. We examine whether these gender differences in evaluations of senior scientists, who are poised to serve as mentors, also affect the evaluation of their protégés' work. Identifying mentors of 4,556 scientists with competitive early career funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), we document a citation discount of 10% on the average paper published by women-relative to men-mentored protégés. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on knowledge recombination has largely focused on inventors' access to knowledge components to be recombined as a key determinant of their inventive performance. Research from psychology has shown that openness and extraversion, two personality traits, increase performance in tasks akin to knowledge recombination. We investigate how personality traits shape invention outcomes conditional on organizational knowledge context. We derive personality measures from a survey of 1,327 inventors and combine them with patent-based indicators of inventive performance. Our findings reveal how the relationship between personality and inventive output is moderated by knowledge context: the positive relationship between openness and invention output is stronger if organizational knowledge diversity is low. In contrast, extraversion negatively relates to invention output, but its effect is positively moderated by knowledge diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inventors recombine existing knowledge elements to identify new technological solutions and novel inventions. We study how inventors' reliance on different sources of knowledge, their personality traits, and the diversification of the organizational knowledge of their employers jointly determine recombination outcomes. In our theorizing, we distinguish inventors' overall recombination success from the share of technologically novel recombinations. Our predictions are tested relying on a large-scale survey of 1,327 industrial inventors, enhanced with patent-based measures of recombination outcomes. The results confirm earlier findings that access to a diverse set of knowledge is positively related to both recombination success and the rate of novel recombinations. Further, we are able to show that this clear relation holds only for inventors employed by firms with low knowledge diversification. Finally, personality dominates the effect of inventors' reliance on different sources of knowledge and is relatively more important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With registry data on 1.4 million individuals in Denmark born 1966-1985, we document large differences between genders in their propensities to become inventors. We also show that parental resources and background predict children's choices of high school track and field of tertiary education, and through them they affect the probability to become an inventor. These factors benefit boys disproportionately more than girls, causing at least part of the gender gap in science and innovation. Parental inventorship matters for children to transition into the inventive job, over and above their educational trajectories, but only for boys. By focusing on a sample of first-born girls and exploiting the randomness of the gender of their second-born sibling, we investigate the mechanisms that likely drive these asymmetric effects. While role models and parental specialization seem to drive the educational choices of children, the effect of parental inventorship that benefits mostly boys is likely because parents anticipate girls to be confronted with a "men's job". Thus, to raise the share of women inventors, in addition to further women's enrolment into STEM, we need to change the threat of this profession being a male kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In distributed innovation projects, crowds and communities are the main drivers of innovation. We investigate the relationship between the status of such a project and the innovation rate, i.e. the share of innovative contributions, it attracts. Status has been shown to attract a greater audience, thereby increasing the odds of receiving innovative contributions. Drawing on status theory and literature on the determinants of innovation, we argue that status may also decrease innovation through motivational crowding (i.e. high status crowds out intrinsically motivated contributors) and reputational contributing (i.e., high status attracts career-conscious contributors). To investigate the status-innovation relationship, we use data on 2,045 open-source software (OSS) projects. Our empirical setting qualifies for a regression discontinuity design. In particular, we exploit exogenous variation in project status due to its appearance on the prestigious front page of Hacker News, a Silicon Valley tech media. We find that status decreases the innovation rate of an OSS project. In particular, projects appearing on the prestigious front page experience a decline in its innovation rate by between 6.3% and 7.8%. Further analyses suggest that this decline can at least partially be attributed to motivational crowding and reputational contributing. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the determinants of innovation, in general, and of distributed innovation, like in OSS projects, in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the premature death of an inventor affects the productivity and career trajectories of co-inventors. To this end, we develop and analyze a dataset covering the careers of 152,350 German inventors. The data combine highly precise employer-employee data from official social security registers with patent office information covering the period from 1980-2014. Departing from 799 registered premature deaths of inventors and the same number of matched inventors, we study how co-inventors were affected by the death of their peers. Using a difference-in- differences and an event study design, we investigate the reaction of the co-inventors' patenting activities, career advancement and job mobility. Using a number of measures and robustness checks, our results show that the premature death of a co- inventor reduces the productivity of the surviving co-inventors. The effect sets in immediately and survivors do not seem to recover from the shock in the five years following. We argue that employers will seek to retain co-inventors under certain conditions in order to continue lines of research and invention. The empirical results confirm our expectations: surviving inventors are significantly less likely to move to a different employer and are more likely to be promoted compared to inventors in the control group. These effects seem to diminish after about two years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The search for external knowledge increases inventive performance. We extend this established view by considering how an inventor's personality is related to her inventive performance. Focusing on plasticity, a higher-order personality trait comprising openness to new experience as well as extraversion, we propose that plasticity is positively related to inventive performance. This effect can be decomposed in a direct effect (plasticity -- performance) and an indirect mediated effect via its association to search behavior (plasticity -- external search -- performance). We test our theoretical predictions in a model of moderated mediation relying on a sample of 1,327 industrial inventors. A positive direct effect of plasticity on inventive performance can be identified across all inventors. The overall positive effect of external search, however, is more pronounced for inventors characterized by low levels of plasticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does homophilous collaboration influence women's early career progress? To answer this question, we turn to a granular dataset of 3,233 highly qualified junior life scientists who receive mentored, early career sponsorship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and analyze their publication trajectories as careers unfold. Employing a matched sample approach that exploits variance in the sets of research contacts the junior scientists start out with, we distinguish sex differences in collaboration choices from potential differences in collaboration opportunities. We document that outsized gender homophily among women exists and primarily stems from how female leaders of scientific projects assemble their teams. Women continue same-sex collaborations as lead authors at twice the rate compared to men, on average, and in particular when the mentor is part of the author team or when the focal junior scientist leads the team. As such, systematic gender homophily among female scientists may engender the sponsorship and resources needed to motivate young women to join and pursue an academic career. On the flip side, we show that author teams led by women receive 11% less citations, on average, and up to 29% less citations for work of comparable caliber published in the most influential journals. Taken together, while women's propensity to working with other women may support early career researchers, biased attention to women's work may harm careers and, in particular, women who publish in the highest-impact journals and who would otherwise be poised to narrowing gender gaps at more senior career stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the impact of social ties and publicly observable performance signals on the mobility of knowledge workers. In our empirical setting we exploit the fall of the Iron Curtain as a natural experiment for the migration decision of East German inventors. We identify 21,935 East German Inventors via their patenting track records prior to 1990 and social security records in the pan-German labor market. By modeling their mobility decision after 1989, we find that West regions with more pronounced social ties attracted more inventors. However, inventors with better performance indicators prior to 1990 are substantially less dependent on these social ties for their migration decision. We find additional evidence that the same group of inventors manage to enter regional labor markets that fit significantly better to their origin region in East Germany. We conclude that social ties support labor market access while visible labor market signals reduce the dependence on these ties [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the link between external knowledge sourcing and the way in which the resulting innovation is commercialized (either by the firm itself, or by an external third party), including the possible moderating effects of inventor communication with relevant internal staff. We base our study, to our knowledge the first large scale empirical analysis of this problem area at the level of the individual innovation, on survey data comprising 4,974 patented and commercialized innovations from 23 countries in all major industries. We find that (1) an innovation based on external knowledge sourcing is more likely to be commercialized by an external party; and that (2) better integration of the externally sourced knowledge through frequent inventor communication with relevant staff inside the firm (in R&D, production and marketing & sales) about the innovation positively moderates the negative relationship between external knowledge sourcing and the commercialization of the resulting innovation by the firm itself. Our results highlight the importance of internal communication for knowledge integration, add to existing theory on commercialization strategies, external knowledge sourcing and open innovation, and have implications for management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the link between employee leisure time activities and the value of their creative output. We argue that leisure time activities - both in general, and specifically with regard to the employee's choice of hobbies - both illuminate and shape the attitudes and attributes the employee brings to work. Based on Woodman et al.'s (1993) "interactionist perspective" on organizational creativity, supplemented by literature on search and knowledge re/combination, we explore whether and how leisure time activities can span the creative space between the employee's home and workplace - given the range of multi-level inputs that may also contribute to workplace creativity. We use original survey data comprising 4,138 inventions from 21 European countries, the United States and Japan, in all major industries. Organizational creativity is measured by the asset value of the patent on the associated invention, and the degree of radicalness of the invention. We find that employees who continue to think about their workplace research while away from work produce more valuable inventions. Diversity of hobbies, more socially oriented hobbies, and more focused hobbies are also positively related to invention value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]