Articles in Refereed Journals
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research
Specialisation and the Career Outcomes of Inventors
(2026). Specialisation and the Career Outcomes of Inventors Research Policy, 55 (5).
Recent years have seen a reorganisation of innovation production to favour groups of collaborators, and increasingly specialised individual 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 knowledge breadth. Empirically, I provide suggestive evidence that after conditioning upon the selection of inventors into specialised careers in certain technological fields, specialisation is associated with a lower probability of contributing to a top-cited invention over the remainder of their career. This suggestive evidence is consistent with a mechanism where specialised inventors are vulnerable to knowledge obsolescence in the late stages of their career. The negative relationship between specialisation and highly cited inventions is concerning given the disproportionate value of such inventions to society.