Organizer:
R&D Management Workshop 2026
Award:
R&D Management Workshop 2026 Best Paper Award
Date:
May 29, 2026
Award Winner:
Eunjung Hyun (Associate Professor, College of Business Administration, Hongik University)
Tae-Seok Kim (Associate Professor, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business)
Byeongwoo Kang (Professor, IIR)
Article Title:
“Cross-Industry Talent Mobility and Trajectory-Shaping Innovation in the Automotive Technological Transition”
Abstract of the paper:
How do incumbent firms generate technologically consequential inventions during industry transitions? We examine this question in the automotive industry, where established automakers have maintained technological dominance while expanding into electric, digital, and softwareintensive domains. We argue that cross-industry inventor mobility serves as an invention-level mechanism of creative accumulation by bringing technologically distant knowledge into incumbent patent teams. Using 259,198 USPTO utility patents filed by automotive assignees between 1990 and 2019, and a coarsened exact matched sample of 84,000 patents, we examine whether patents involving cross-industry migrant inventors exhibit higher breakthrough potential. We measure breakthrough potential using a forward-to-backward semantic similarity approach implemented with PatentSBERTa embeddings. We find that patents involving crossindustry migrant inventors are associated with higher breakthrough potential, whereas patents involving within-industry migrants are not. This association is stronger in technologically insular subfields, where external technological knowledge is less represented in the local prior-art base, and in subfields with greater knowledge interconnectedness. It is also stronger in experienced inventor teams and appears only in mixed teams combining cross-industry migrant and nonmigrant inventors. These findings suggest that incumbent breakthrough potential depends not merely on acquiring external knowledge, but on where and with whom that knowledge is recombined.