In knowledge we trust: Learning-by-interacting and the productivity of inventors

Innovation rarely happens through the actions of a single person. Innovators source ideas while interacting with peers at different levels and intensities. With a dataset of disambiguated inventors from 1980 to 2010 in European metropolitan areas, we assess the influence of their interactions with co-workers, organizations' colleagues, and geographically co-located peers on their productivity. By adding many fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity, we uncover the importance of metropolitan areas knowledge for inventors' productivity, with firms and co-workers' network knowledge being less relevant. When the complexity and quality of knowledge are accounted for, the picture changes: proximate, social interactions become central.

Automated summary

The study found that the productivity of inventors is influenced by their interactions with colleagues, organizational colleagues, and geographically co-located peers. Metropolitan knowledge is crucial for inventors' productivity, while network knowledge of firms and colleagues is less relevant. When accounting for the complexity and quality of knowledge, proximate social interactions become central.