The Moderating Effects of Firm's and Industrial Co-Inventive Networks on the Relationship Between R&D Employees’ Mobility and Firm Creativity

Knowledge is the primary factor for firm creativity that is mostly embedded in employees. Meanwhile, R&D employee mobility is quite frequently in high technology firms. This situation suggests a critical management task of firm creativity and innovation: how to retain the knowledge of the current R&D employee and benefit from the knowledge brought by new R&D employees to improve firm creativity. Based on extant studies which found that the collaboration network correlated with employees’ knowledge retention, knowledge flow, and cognitive lock-in this article proposed that the characteristics of a firm's co-inventive network and industrial co-inventive network moderate the influence of R&D employees’ mobility on firm creativity. Empirical results based on the Chinese firms’ invention patents in the information and communication technology industry demonstrate that the highly connected firm's co-inventive networks impair the damage of R&D employees’ outward mobility to firm creativity. Moreover, the firm's low degree of centrality in the industrial co-inventive network decreases the contribution of R&D employees’ inward mobility to firm creativity, and the firm's low betweenness centrality in the industrial co-inventive network helps it obtain the benefit from R&D employees’ inward mobility. We discussed these results, which are meaningful to both R&D managers and industrial policymakers.