Workforce Mobility and Innovation Outcomes

Employee ideas are a valuable starting point to improve operational efficiency. Organizations therefore systematically tap into employee knowledge. In this paper we empirically investigate how moves between problems and sites affect the innovation value created by employee ideas for the organization. We document that the dynamic effects of problem switches differ fundamentally from the effects of site switches: The innovation outcomes of problem switching employees follow a concave inverse u-shaped pattern, whereas the innovation outcomes of site switching employees follow a convex u-shaped pattern over time. Our findings first contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of workforce mobility and its effects on innovation outcomes. Furthermore, using an evolutionary lens, we develop a search-based framework that coherently explains the dynamics of innovation outcomes. We thus contribute to search theory by theoretically linking worker mobility, search behaviour and innovation outcomes