Collaborative Research: Inter-Industry Differences in the Antecedents and Consequences of Industrial Scientists Mobility and Entrepreneurship Decisions

本研究考察了产业科学家流动与创业决策的前因后果在产业间的差异。分析了三个问题：1)为什么一些高科技行业的科学家流动性和创业率高于其他行业？2)科技人才的流动和创业进入对高技术产业的创新扩散模式有何影响？3)产业特征如何与企业和个人属性相互作用，影响产业科学家创建的新创企业的就业增长？该项目以互补资产的作用为中心，并假设其重要性的行业间差异在解释产业科学家流动和创业决策的比率和结果的行业异质性方面发挥了关键作用，从而成为所有三个研究问题的理论基础。特别关注的是互补的非人力资产在重要性和可移植性方面的行业间差异，它们如何影响单个科学家的职业决策，以及它们如何影响行业内科学家流动和创业的水平以及跨行业边界的科学家流动和创业的方向。数据的实证分析侧重于在高科技产业环境中工作的科学家。这些高科技行业内部和之间的企业家精神和流动性。智力价值：与之前研究科学家在公司层面和单一行业背景下职业选择的前因和后果的大多数文献相反，本研究通过关注广泛跨行业背景下个人层面的决策来检验这些问题。因此，这项研究考察了政策制定者和学者都感兴趣的多个重要差距。特别是，通过构建个体科学家分析单元的知识扩散过程的微观基础，它有助于系统地理解产业科学家流动和高科技产业企业家精神的产业间差异。在理解和促进产业更新的背景下，理解产业科学家职业选择的前因和后果中的产业异质性尤为重要，因为科学家可能在新技术的创造和商业化中发挥关键作用，这些新技术可以在公司、行业和地区层面上产生重要的增长效应。更广泛的影响：该研究为科技和创新政策制定者提供了关于哪些行业条件最有利于通过科技人员创业来增加就业的信息。此外，它还审查了激励一个可能至关重要但迄今尚未得到充分审查的高科技创业来源的结果：在重点产业之外雇用的科学家。研究结果还可以为科学家的职业决策提供信息，了解行业层面的因素，这些因素可能促进或阻碍成功的初创企业进入和随后的发展。

This research examines inter-industry differences in the antecedents and consequences of industrial scientists' mobility and entrepreneurship decisions. Three questions are analyzed 1) Why do some high technology industries have higher rates of scientist mobility and entrepreneurship than others? 2) What are the innovation diffusion patterns across high technology industries due to mobility and entrepreneurial entry of scientific personnel? 3) How do industry characteristics interact with firm and individual attributes to impact employment growth of new ventures created by industrial scientists? The project centers on the role of complementary assets and posits that inter-industry differences in their importance play a critical role in explaining industry heterogeneity in the rates and outcomes of industrial scientist mobility and entrepreneurship decisions and thus serve as the theoretical underpinnings for all three research questions. A particular focus is on inter-industry differences in the importance and transportability of complementary non-human assets, how they shape the career decisions of individual scientists, and how they affect both the levels of scientist mobility and entrepreneurship within industries and the direction of scientist mobility and entrepreneurship that occurs across industry boundaries. The empirical analysis of the data focuses on scientists working in high-tech industry settings tracks scientists? entrepreneurship and mobility within and between these high-tech sectors.Intellectual Merit: In contrast to most of the prior literature that studied the antecedents and consequences of the career choices of scientists at the firm level and within a single industry context, this research examines the questions by focusing on individual level decisions in a broad cross-industry setting. This thus examines multiple important gaps that are of interest to both policy makers and academics. In particular, by building the micro-foundations of the knowledge diffusion process at the individual scientist unit of analysis, it helps to build a systematic understanding of inter-industry differences in industrial scientist mobility and entrepreneurship in high tech industries. Understanding industry heterogeneity in the antecedents and consequences of the career choices of industrial scientists is particularly important in the context of understanding and promoting industry renewal as scientists are likely to play a key role in the creation and commercialization of new technologies which can have important growth effects at the firm-, industry-, and regional-level.Broader Impacts: The study informs science and innovation policy makers about what industry conditions are most conducive to employment growth via entrepreneurship by scientific personnel. In addition, it examines the results of incentivizing a potentially crucial but heretofore under-examined source of high tech entrepreneurship: scientists employed outside of the focal industry. The results may also inform scientists' career decisions about industry-level factors that may facilitate or create impediments to successful start-up entry and subsequent growth.