Excerpt
Excerpt
Collaborate to Innovate? Teams and Patent Generation in a Global R&D Center. Prithwiraj Choudhury, April 2016, Paper. "How should firms organize their employees to generate patents? Are larger teams better than smaller teams, and should their members span formal and informal intra-firm boundaries? We argue that larger teams face greater coordination costs and cooperation problems, and even greater challenges if they span more intra-firm boundaries. Hence, the relationship between team size and patent generation will be more negative if team members belong to more formal organizational units but more positive if they belong to more overlapping informal communities. We also predict that these moderating effects will be exponential rather than linear in form. We test the hypotheses using a proprietary dataset that combines patent data with fine-grained personnel data from the Indian R&D center of a Fortune 50 technology company." Link