Article 2018

Vertical educational diversity and innovation performance

BT
Bolli, Thomas
 RU
Renold, Ursula
 WM
Woerter, Martin
Economics of Innovation and New Technology
Journal · Vol. 27 · Issue 2 · pp. 107-131
Abstract

This paper uses panel data of Swiss firms to analyse the impact of education-level diversity in the workforce on innovation performance, addressing endogeneity by exploiting within-firm variation as well as variation in labour supply across regions. We find that vertical educational diversity increases the extensive margin of R&D and product innovation, particularly new product innovation. However, the relationship with process innovation, R&D intensity, and product innovation intensity is insignificant. These results are in line with the idea that vertical educational diversity enhances the creative moment of the invention phase, while it has no effect on the commercialization phase due to the relevance of coordination and communication costs relative to the gains in creativity. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

Author Keywords

innovation performance process innovation product innovation R&D Vertical educational diversity

Index Keywords

Author Affiliations
Konjunkturforschungsstelle, Zurich, ZH, Switzerland
Funding & Acknowledgements
No funding information
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