Is there a role for the multifaceted Renaissance Man in modern team-intensive innovation activities? This paper argues that researchers with broad knowledge, also known as generalists, make an especially valuable contribution to innovation teams. Given the re-combinative nature of technological...

Hiring away inventors has long been recognized as a way of learning used by innovative firms. This paper claims that the characteristics of the knowledge accumulated by an inventor at his current employer affect what hiring firms can learn from him. The implication is that some inventors are...

Based on a survey of the inventors of 9,017 European patented inventions, this paper provides new information about the characteristics of European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and...

"This paper analyzes the incentives of patentholders to license their technologies for pure-revenue reasons. We hypothesize that this decision is mainly driven by characteristics of the innovation, which determine its technological attractiveness, the relevance of transaction costs in its...

Is there a role for the multifaceted Renaissance Man in modern team-intensive innovation activities? This paper argues that generalist inventors, holding a broad knowledge set, make an especially valuable contribution to innovation teams in uncertain contexts. For a given level of team knowledge...