TY - JOUR
T1 - Mounting Corporate Innovation Performance
T2 - The Effects of High-skilled Migrant Hires and Integration Capacity
AU - Laursen, Keld
AU - Leten, Bart
AU - Nguyen, Ngoc Han
AU - Vancauteren, Marc
PY - 2020/11
Y1 - 2020/11
N2 - We adopt an organizational learning approach to examine how firms’ recruitment of high-skilled migrants contributes to subsequent firm-level innovation performance. We argue that due to migrants’ often different experience from that of native high-skilled workers, their perspectives on problem-solving and access to non-overlapping knowledge networks will also differ. The implied complementarity between these worker types makes migrant hires a particularly valuable resource in the context of firm-level innovation. We refine our diversity hypothesis further by predicting that migrant hires who add to the firm's cultural diversity should contribute more to firm innovation performance than new high-skilled migrant hires who do not add cultural diversity. Finally, we conjecture that firms with high integration capacity as a function of prior experience of employing high-skilled migrants should derive more innovation-related benefits from migrant hiring than firms with a low integration capacity. We track the inward mobility of high-skilled workers empirically using patents and matched employer-employee data for 16,241 Dutch firms over an 11-year period. We find support for our hypotheses.
AB - We adopt an organizational learning approach to examine how firms’ recruitment of high-skilled migrants contributes to subsequent firm-level innovation performance. We argue that due to migrants’ often different experience from that of native high-skilled workers, their perspectives on problem-solving and access to non-overlapping knowledge networks will also differ. The implied complementarity between these worker types makes migrant hires a particularly valuable resource in the context of firm-level innovation. We refine our diversity hypothesis further by predicting that migrant hires who add to the firm's cultural diversity should contribute more to firm innovation performance than new high-skilled migrant hires who do not add cultural diversity. Finally, we conjecture that firms with high integration capacity as a function of prior experience of employing high-skilled migrants should derive more innovation-related benefits from migrant hiring than firms with a low integration capacity. We track the inward mobility of high-skilled workers empirically using patents and matched employer-employee data for 16,241 Dutch firms over an 11-year period. We find support for our hypotheses.
KW - High-skilled migration
KW - Innovation
KW - Immigrant/firm cultural match
KW - Integration capacity
KW - High-skilled migration
KW - Innovation
KW - Immigrant/firm cultural match
KW - Integration capacity
UR - https://sfx-45cbs.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/45cbs?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&url_ctx_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info:sid/sfxit.com:azlist&sfx.ignore_date_threshold=1&rft.object_id=954921364529&rft.object_portfolio_id=&svc.holdings=yes&svc.fulltext=yes
U2 - 10.1016/j.respol.2020.104034
DO - 10.1016/j.respol.2020.104034
M3 - Journal article
VL - 49
JO - Research Policy
JF - Research Policy
SN - 0048-7333
IS - 9
M1 - 104034
ER -