Hyo Kang

Knowledge protection strategies are crucial to innovating firms facing the risk of knowledge leakage. We examine the threat of worker departure as a key mechanism through which firms choose between patents and secrecy. We exploit a 1998 California court decision that ruled out-of-state noncompetes were not enforceable in California, thereby creating a loophole limiting non-California firms in their enforcement of noncompetes against their workers. When facing a higher threat of worker departure, firms strategically increased patent filings, exchanging legal protection for public disclosure of the invention. These effects were magnified for large-sized firms and for those in complex and fast-growing industries. Further mechanism tests on the possession of trade secrets, inventor migration, saliency of the decision, and independent inventors support our theoretical account.

Despite the upsurge in cross-border R&D collaboration within multinational corporations (MNCs), firms often fail to realize the full potential of cross-border R&D teams. We examine under what conditions geographic diversity might lead to higher or lower innovation performance by focusing on the moderating roles of team composition. We first demonstrate that the geographic diversity of an MNC’s research team has a curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship with the team’s innovation performance. Building upon group learning theory, we further claim that this non-linear relationship is strengthened by the technical experience heterogeneity of researchers but weakened by repeated collaboration among researchers. Our analyses on the top 25 multinational pharmaceutical companies and their 59,998 patents registered from 1981 to 2012 provide strong support for our hypotheses. When geographic diversity is relatively low, teams with different levels of technical experience and more fresh collaborators improve performance by amplifying the benefits of sourcing diverse knowledge. With high geographic dispersion, on the other hand, minimal experience heterogeneity and more instances of past collaboration lead to better performance by facilitating the integration of diverse knowledge. The results shed light on the importance of technical and social relationships among researchers in sourcing and integrating location-specific knowledge and ultimately enhancing team performance.

Most research on non‐competes has focused on employees; here we study how non‐competes affect firm location choice, growth, and consequent regional concentration, using Florida's 1996 legislative change that eased restrictions on their enforcement. Difference‐in‐differences models show that following the change, establishments of large firms were more likely to enter Florida; they also created a greater proportion of jobs and increased their share of employment in the state. Entrepreneurs or establishments of small firms, in contrast, were less likely to enter Florida following the law change; they also created a smaller proportion of new jobs and decreased their share of employment. Consistent with these location and job creation dynamics, regional business concentration increased following the law change in Florida. Nationwide cross‐sections demonstrate consistent correlations between state‐level non‐compete enforcement and the location, employment, and concentration dynamics illustrated in Florida.

This study examines factors underlying three phases of change or persistence in industrial leadership in the sector of interchangeable-lens cameras over the past century. During this period there were two major phases of leadership change, both associated with the emergence of innovations involving major discontinuities in the industry’s core technologies. First, Japan won market leadership from Germany in the mid-1960s after commercializing the single-lens reflex (SLR) camera that replaced the previously dominant German rangefinder camera. Second, in the late-2000s, Japanese latecomer firms and a Korean firm developed Mirrorless cameras, which allowed them to capture the majority of market share from the incumbent Japanese leaders. We also examine the long period (about 60 years) between these two phases of change, during which leading Japanese firms were able to sustain their market leadership despite the digital revolution from the 1980s to 1990s. This paper explores the factors influencing these contrasting experiences of change and persistence in industry leadership. The analysis integrates several aspects of sectoral innovation systems – i.e., windows of opportunity associated with technology, demand, and institution – as well as the strategies of incumbents and latecomer firms. The conclusions highlight the complex and diverse combinations and importance of the factors that help explain the patterns of shifts in leadership.