(2025). Specialisation and the Career Outcomes of Inventors Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, 2025 (1).
Recent years have seen a reorganisation of innovation production to favour groups of collaborators, and increasingly specialised inventors. In this paper, I construct a panel of highly prolific inventors whom I observe frequently throughout their career. I develop a simple setting whereby inventors face a trade-off between acquiring knowledge depth and knowl- edge breadth. Empirically, I find that, after controlling for selection into specialised careers, knowledge depth is consistently negatively associated with the probability that an inventor contributes to an invention which receives citations in the top quantile. The negative effects largely hold across technological fields and, across the inventor’s career cycle. The negative relationship between specialisation and highly-cited inventions is concerning given the disproportionate value of such inventions to society.
Also published in: Research Policy Volume 55, Issue 5, June 2026, 105477
