Spanning Boundaries: The Role of Publishing Inventors in R&D Teams

Using a social network lens, we look at collaboration networks between authors and inventors. Specifically, we study how the presence of publishing inventors in an R&D team affects the quality of the inventions to which they contribute. We analyze the characteristics of publishing inventors by identifying those who span the same or distinct groups in the co-authorship network and thereby provide access to more or less redundant knowledge. Publishing inventors also can play a pivotal role in holding the co- authorship and co-invention networks together by serving as cutpoints – i.e., occupying a gatekeeping position between the two networks. The results of the analysis suggest that publishing inventors who connect the team with which they are involved to diverse (non-overlapping) groups in the co-authorship network and serve as cutpoints are more likely to contribute to inventions (patents) of greater quality. We tested our hypotheses in the emerging field of nanotechnology.