Blending Talents for Innovation: Team Composition for Cross-Border R&D Collaboration Within Multinational Corporations

59 Pages Posted: 8 May 2020

See all articles by Eunkwang Seo

Eunkwang Seo

Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University

Hyo Kang

Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California

Jaeyong Song

Seoul National University - College of Business Administration

Date Written: March 27, 2020

Abstract

Despite the upsurge in cross-border R&D collaboration within multinational corporations (MNCs), firms often fail to realize the full potential of cross-border R&D teams. We examine under what conditions geographic diversity might lead to higher or lower innovation performance by focusing on the moderating roles of team composition. We first demonstrate that the geographic diversity of an MNC’s research team has a curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship with the team’s innovation performance. Building upon group learning theory, we further claim that this non-linear relationship is strengthened by the technical experience of researchers but weakened by repeated collaboration among researchers. Our analyses on the top 25 multinational pharmaceutical companies and their 59,998 patents registered from 1981-2012 provide strong supports for our hypotheses. When geographic diversity is relatively low, teams with different levels of technical experience and more fresh collaborators improve performance by amplifying the benefits of sourcing diverse knowledge. With high geographic dispersion, on the other hand, minimal experience heterogeneity and more instances of past collaboration lead to better performance by facilitating the integration of diverse knowledge. The results shed light on the importance of technical and social relationships among researchers in sourcing and integrating location-specific knowledge and ultimately enhancing team performance.

Keywords: cross-border R&D collaboration, global innovation, multinational corporations, team composition, group learning theory, pharmaceutical industry

Suggested Citation

Seo, Eunkwang and Kang, Hyo and Song, Jaeyong, Blending Talents for Innovation: Team Composition for Cross-Border R&D Collaboration Within Multinational Corporations (March 27, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3575878 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3575878

Eunkwang Seo

Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University ( email )

111 N Hester St
Stillwater, OK 74078
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.eunkwangseo.com

Hyo Kang

Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California ( email )

701 Exposition Blvd
Los Angeles, CA California 90089
United States

HOME PAGE: http://hyokang.com

Jaeyong Song (Contact Author)

Seoul National University - College of Business Administration ( email )

Seoul, 151-742
Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
138
Abstract Views
987
Rank
376,949
PlumX Metrics