Scope versus Speed: Team Diversity, Leader Experience, and Patenting Outcomes for Firms

Abstract

How does the organization of patenting activity affect a firm’s patenting outcomes? We investigate how the composition of patenting teams relates to both the scope of their patent applications and the speed of their patent approvals by examining the main effects of team members’ intra-organizational diversity (based on affiliations with formal organizational units and informal organizational communities) and the moderating effects of team leader experience. We test our moderated mediation model in a sample of 121 teams that filed patents in a Fortune 50 company’s India R&D center between 2005 and 2015 using proprietary employee data combined with newly released micro-data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Our findings illuminate the micro-foundations of innovation in firms by highlighting a trade-off between organizing patenting activity to maximize scope versus speed.