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• Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2019

  Kenya Railways

  Caroline M. Elkins, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tarun Khanna

  Keywords: Kenya;

  Citation:

  Elkins, Caroline M., Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Tarun Khanna. "Kenya Railways." Harvard Business School Case 319-109, June 2019.  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

  Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations

  Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Hillel Rapoport

  We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25% to 50% more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold increase in the number of foreign inventors from other nations that specialize in those same technologies. For the average country in our sample this number corresponds to only 25 inventors with a standard deviation of 135. We deal with endogeneity concerns by using historical migration networks to instrument for stocks of migrant inventors. Our results generalize the evidence of previous studies that show how migrant inventors "import" knowledge from their home countries that translate into higher patenting. We complement our results with micro-evidence showing that migrant inventors are more prevalent in the first bulk of patents of a country in a given technology, as compared to patents filed at later stages. We interpret these results as tangible evidence of migrants facilitating the technology-specific diffusion of knowledge across nations.

  Keywords: innovation; migration; patent; Immigration; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Technology; Knowledge Dissemination;

  Citation:

  Bahar, Dany, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Hillel Rapoport. "Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-119, May 2019.  View Details

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• Article | Strategic Management Journal | February 2019

  The Ethnic Migrant Inventor Effect: Codification and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders

  Prithwiraj Choudhury and Do Yoon Kim

  Ethnic migrant inventors may differ from locals in terms of the knowledge they bring to host firms. We study the role of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors in cross-border transfer of knowledge previously locked within the cultural context of their home regions. Using a unique dataset of Chinese and Indian herbal patents filed in the United States, we find that an increase in the supply of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors increases the rate of codification of herbal knowledge at U.S. assignees by 4.5%. Our identification comes from an exogenous shock to the quota of H1B visas and from a list of entities exempted from the shock. We also find that ethnic migrant inventors are more likely to engage in reuse of their prior knowledge, whereas knowledge recombination is more likely to be pursued by teams comprising inventors from other ethnic backgrounds.

  Keywords: skilled migration; ethnic migration; first-generation migrant; cultural context; knowledge flows; knowledge reuse; knowledge recombination; recombinant creation; H1B visas; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Knowledge Dissemination; Immigration; Ethnicity; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues;

  Citation:

  Choudhury, Prithwiraj, and Do Yoon Kim. "The Ethnic Migrant Inventor Effect: Codification and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders." Strategic Management Journal 40, no. 2 (February 2019): 203–229.  View Details

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