“It Matters Where People Live: Innovative Collaborations and the Proximity of Inventors’ Residences”, a seminar by Professor Myles Shaver (University of Minnesota)

“It Matters Where People Live: Innovative Collaborations and the Proximity of Inventors’ Residences”

by Professor Myles Shaver

Abstract

We examine if the geographic proximity of knowledge workers’ residences (i.e., residential proximity) affects the likelihood that they collaborate. We expect that the underlying mechanisms for why proximity in the workplace affects collaboration extend beyond the workplace and hypothesize that residential proximity enhances workplace collaboration. By examining patent outcomes and inventor residential location in the Warsaw Indiana orthopedic device cluster – a setting that provides many research design advantages to isolate our predicted effect, we find support for this hypothesis. Moreover, we find that the residential proximity effect is manifest for employees in different divisions and manifests among workers of the same gender.  This suggests that residential proximity can relax organization-imposed constraints to collaboration (ie., divisional affiliation) subject to social constraints (ie., gender differences). Documenting residential proximity as a within-firm agglomeration measure provides a novel theoretical rationale to explain different innovation outcomes between firms and across regions and better isolates how social mechanism stemming from geographic proximity affect collaboration.

About the speaker

Myles Shaver is professor of strategic management and entrepreneurship at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, where he holds the Curtis L Carlson chair in corporate strategy. His current research interests center on corporate location strategies (especially headquarters operations), corporate expansion strategies, and causal identification in strategic management research. Myles is President and a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society.