Diskussionspapiere
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research
Intellectual Mobility Frictions
(2025). Intellectual Mobility FrictionsMax Planck Institute for Innovation & Competition Research Paper No. 25-15.
Despite repeated findings that intellectually mobile inventors-those with experience in multiple technological fields-have a comparative advantage in the production of the highest value inventions, aggregate evidence suggests that the share of intellectually mobile inventors is falling. In this paper, we propose the presence of allocation frictions which increase the cost a firm must pay to allocate inventors to a technological field in which they have not previously invented. We create a simple framework to estimate these frictions at the micro-level and find them to be very high in magnitude, and heterogeneous across firms and the technological space. Counterfactual estimates suggest that even moderate decreases in these allocation frictions could increase idea generation by 50%.