Tristan Fitzgerald (Texas A&M University) presenting his paper at the EPFL Virtual Innovation Seminar on August 17, 2020.
Title. Shared Culture and Technological Innovation: Evidence from Corporate R&D Teams.
Abstract. Given the increasing emphasis on workplace diversity and labor productivity in today’s economy,
we seek to open the “black box” process of corporate innovation production by focusing on the
most important input into the firm’s R&D process, namely the individual employees tasked with developing new innovations. Using information on over four million inventors employed at U.S.
public firms, we investigate how individual inventors’ inherited traits (cultural values and gender)
and acquired career experiences affect their desire to collaborate with one another in a corporate
R&D team setting and how shared cultural values amongst R&D team members affects innovative output. We first provide novel evidence that, even amongst groups of comparably experienced
inventors working in the same corporate office, inventors who share similar cultural values are
significantly more likely to work together on new research projects. Second, utilizing exogenous
shocks to inventor team composition arising from premature co-inventor deaths, we find that more
culturally homogenous teams produce a higher quantity of patents that are more likely to exploit
existing technologies and become moderately successful inventions. In contrast, more culturally
diverse inventor teams produce a higher share of risky, more exploratory patents that have a greater
chance of becoming high impact innovations. Overall, our results have important implications for
promoting corporate innovation in R&D intensive workplace environments.
