Essays on Scientific Human Capital and Innovation

Abstract

Scientific human capital plays a central role in knowledge production and innovation within organizations. Yet, the conditions under which scientific expertise translates into organizational performance remain imperfectly understood. This dissertation examines the challenges organizations face in selecting and deploying scientific human capital. The first essay studies firms’ hiring of scientists from academia. I show that scientists' productivity in academia is only weakly correlated with their productivity in industry. As a result, making hiring decisions based on academic productivity can lead firms to select scientists who perform poorly in industry and are subsequently laid off. The second essay, co-authored with John McKeon, examines how constraints in high-performance computing shape scientists' output. We show that resource scarcity not only reduces the number of publications produced, but also shifts researchers toward less exploratory and less novel projects. The third essay, co-authored with Maria Roche, studies the commercialization of scientific knowledge in entrepreneurial settings. We show that startups whose technologies rely heavily on their inventors’ own scientific research are less likely to achieve successful exit outcomes, especially when the inventor is not involved in founding the venture. Together, these essays document the challenges organizations face in selecting and deploying scientific human capital, and the conditions under which scientific expertise can be effectively translated into successful outcomes.