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Top management team’s innovation-related characteristics and the firm’s explorative R&D: an analysis based on patent data

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Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between characteristics of the firm’s top management team (TMT) and its research and development (R&D) activities. Specifically, this research analyzes how observable characteristics of the TMT, such as functional experiences or educational background, and average tenure affect the firm’s proportion of explorative R&D activities. From the perspective of the upper-echelon theory, we hypothesize that the TMT’s functional experiences with R&D or science or engineering educational backgrounds increase the firm’s tendency towards explorative R&D. Moreover, we propose that the average tenure of TMT members with innovation-related experiences would have a positive moderation effects on these relationships. The hypotheses are tested using a dataset containing biographical information of the TMT members, financial, and patent data of 89 firms in U.S. high-tech industries from 2006 to 2009. Firm’s explorative R&D activities are analyzed using data on patent citations, patent classes, and non-patent references. The empirical analysis shows that the top managers’ educational background in science or engineering as well as their previous functional experiences with R&D have a positive effect on the firm’s explorative innovation activities. We also find that the size of these effects increases with a longer tenure of these TMT members. Our findings provide implications related to the effects of organizational characteristics on the establishment of a R&D strategy and highlight the role of TMT members with innovative experiences in directing a firm’s R&D activities and outcomes.

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Notes

  1. Verbeek et al. (2002), Callaert et al. (2006, 2012, 2014) and Shirabe (2014) demonstrate classifying methods for identifying scientific publications among non-patent references.

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Acknowledgements

The Institute of Engineering Research at Seoul National University provided research facilities for the duration of this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technology Management, Economics, and Policy Program (TEMEP), College of Engineering, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 151-744, South Korea

    Chul Lee, Klaus Marhold & Jina Kang

  2. Samsung SDS, SDS West Campus, Olympic-ro 35, Songpa-gu, Seoul, 138-240, South Korea

    Gunno Park

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  1. Chul Lee
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Correspondence to Jina Kang.

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Lee, C., Park, G., Marhold, K. et al. Top management team’s innovation-related characteristics and the firm’s explorative R&D: an analysis based on patent data. Scientometrics 111, 639–663 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2322-1

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