Family Enterprise Legacy Institute and the Telfer Research Office - Seminar with Brian Silverman
How Do Inventors’ Political Preferences Affect Innovation?
Team production in innovation has been growing in importance. Simultaneously, political polarization has been increasing over time. This paper examines how inventor political ideology affects innovation team formation and subsequent team innovative productivity. To examine these questions, we match North Carolina-resident inventors in the USPTO patent database to their voter registration records, which contain individuals’ political affiliation and aspects of their voting behavior. We also geolocate each patent assignee to create a risk-set of potential co-inventors in each organization location and in each county. Using a variety of statistical techniques, we describe both the regularities in the data and results from econometric analysis. We estimate that 53%-62% of NC inventors are U.S. citizens, the vast majority of whom are male, white, and middle-aged. Republican (Democratic) inventors are overrepresented (underrepresented) in NC relative to the underlying distribution of voters in the state. Citizen-inventors are civic-minded, more so on almost every dimension than a similar sample of citizens. Republican inventors pursue different technologies than Democratic inventors. In econometric estimations we show that there is political homophily within co-invention teams: Democrats (Republicans) tend to form teams with other Democrats (Republicans). We also assess the performance of innovative teams in terms of conversion of patent applications into granted patents. Ideologically homogenous teams tend to underperform ideologically heterogeneous teams in patent grants, but outperform heterogeneous teams on forward citations, conditional on a patent grant.
Coffee and cookies will be available.
About the Speaker
Brian Silverman is a Professor of Strategic Management and the J.R.S. Prichard and Ann Wilson Chair in Management at the
Prior to rejoining the Rotman School in 2001, Brian was Assistant Professor of Competition and Strategy at Harvard Business School, where he taught the core strategy course and jointly developed an elective on Technology and Competitive Strategy with faculty at the MIT Media Laboratory. He has been a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, Copenhagen Business School, London Business School, New York University, Singapore Management University, Technion, Université de Paris (Sorbonne), University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and the Wharton School. He is currently Co-Editor of Strategic Management Journal.
