Invisible Constraints: The Relationship among Non-Competition Agreements, Inventor Mobility, and Patent Commercialization.

To advance our understanding of the institutional-level influence of intellectual property policies on innovation, this article investigates a set of hypotheses questioning the links between state-level non-competition agreements, inventor mobility, and patent commercialization. It uses US inventor survey data covering a sample of 1,900 triadic patents. Results provide some evidence in support of the prevalent, yet under-researched, proposition that mobile inventors perform better than non-mobile ones in terms of commercialization activity. This article also finds that the severity of judicial enforcement of non-competition agreements has hampered the positive contribution of inventor mobility to invention commercialization and concludes that legal infrastructure is a crucial factor in innovation and invention success stories. Findings, therefore, have considerable policy implications with respect to the role of the judiciary in the enforcement of non-competition agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]