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

Prithwiraj  Choudhury; Do Yoon  Kim

Article | Strategic Management Journal | February 2019

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

Abstract

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;

Format: Print

Find at Harvard Read Now

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.

We demonstrate how a novel synthesis of three methods—(1) unsupervised topic modeling of text data to generate new measures of textual variance, (2) sentiment analysis of text data, and (3) supervised ML coding of facial images with a cutting-edge convolutional neural network algorithm—can shed light on questions related to CEO oral communication. With videos and corresponding transcripts of interviews with emerging market CEOs, we employ this synthesis of methods to discover five distinct communication styles that incorporate both verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication. Our data are comprised of interviews that represent unedited expressions and content, making them especially suitable as data sources for the measurement of an individual’s communication style. We then perform a proof-of-concept analysis, correlating CEO communication styles to M&A outcomes, highlighting the value of combining text and videographic data to define styles. We also discuss the benefits of using our methods versus current research methods.

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.

Faculty & Research

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

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author