This study aims to examine how team collaboration affects the inter-firm mobility of inventors. Since knowledge accumulated through team collaboration can be complementary or substitute to the teammates, teamwork can affect the relative value of the inventor’s knowledge inside the firm versus the outside value in opposing ways. In this paper, we explore to what extent and in which circumstances teamwork leads to more or less inter-firm mobility. Leveraging on the premature death of collaborators as an exogenous shock to teamwork, we find that inventors who lose a collaborator are more likely to leave their current firm (than otherwise similar inventors). This average negative effect between collaboration and mobility, however, is driven by a particularly intense relationship in technological areas of high complexity and quick obsolescence, suggesting that it is in these areas where collaboration complementarities play a key role in the generation of knowledge.

This research aims to advance the understanding of learning after hiring by investigating the effect of intra-firm network structure on learning patterns in a post-hiring context. Right after a new hire moves to the hiring firm, both the new hires and the incumbent inventors in the hiring firm learn from each other. The new hires choose pieces of knowledge to recombine from the hiring firms’ prior knowledge (new hire absorption), and at the same time, incumbent inventors choose pieces of knowledge to recombine from the new hires’ prior knowledge (incumbent absorption). I study how the small world network structure shapes differently these two types of learning. Using the patent data in the US between 1980 and 2015, I find that a small-world network structure facilitates incumbent absorption, while it impedes new hire absorption. The effect is more significant in discrete industries than in complex ones, suggesting that it is in these areas where information efficiency plays a key role in knowledge integration after poaching a new employee.

When presented with emerging technological prospects, firms redeploy engineers from established technology domains to newly emerging ones, with the aim of harnessing the potential presented by these nascent technologies. Within this framework, this paper studies how collaborative network structure within firms affects the selection of engineers to be redeployed to the new technology opportunities.