Three Essays on the Impact of Knowledge Accumulation on the Process of Knowledge Creation with a Focus on Collaboration

The cumulative nature of knowledge constantly alters the innovative landscape and thus the process of knowledge creation. In this dissertation, I explore the impact of cumulativeness on individual-level collaboration as it shapes the production of new ideas. I focus on two main influencing factors: conditions of access to knowledge and knowledge accumulation as it leads to increased specialization. This is important since the ability to build on knowledge influences the evolution of innovation trajectories.In the first study, I explore the composition of collaboration and the impact of a researcher level of expertise on the type of knowledge created. Leveraging a natural experiment, the launch of Microsoft Kinect, which triggered an unanticipated reduction in the cost of motion-sensing technology, I examine how individuals respond to opportunities for knowledge creation opened by a change in conditions of access to knowledge. Despite growing emphasis on the importance of specialists for knowledge creation, I identify generalists - researchers with broader exposure to knowledge - as playing a particularly important role in the process of innovation with implications for the type of knowledge created. Specifically, generalists have a higher propensity than specialists to respond to opportunities for knowledge creation that span knowledge areas and play a central role in coordinating collaboration between specialists required to execute on the opportunities. In the second study, I focus on the impact of increased specialization due to knowledge accumulation on the rate of collaboration. The knowledge burden hypothesis - that reaching the knowledge frontier is progressively costly due to knowledge accumulation and results in increasing specialization and collaboration - is one of several theories advanced to explain the widely documented observation that researcher team size is increasing over time. I exploit a natural experiment, the collapse of the USSR as an exogenous shock to the knowledge frontier in theoretical mathematics, to provide results of a first causal test in support of the knowledge burden hypothesis. This identification exercise is important since this hypothesis leads to policy implications that do not apply to other explanations of increases in team size. Lastly, in the third study, I discuss the influence of collaboration and individual-level breadth and depth of expertise in potentially influencing the rate and direction of a big science project. A narrative on commercial quantum computing innovation, a controversial contemporaneous endeavour, suggests the influential role of an entrepreneurial venture coordinating large-scale collaboration to exploit an opportunity at the intersection of knowledge areas.Ph.D