This study examines how certifications influence firms’ innovation search strategies. Focusing on high-tech enterprise (HTE) certifications granted by the Chinese government, we explore whether and how these certifications shape the extent to which firms search within familiar versus unfamiliar technological domains. While HTE certifications are intended to promote innovation, we argue that the institutional pressures they generate, particularly through recurring evaluations and reputational expectations, can unintentionally constrain search in uncertain but potentially transformative domains. We find that certifications lead to a reduction in firms’ search beyond their established technological domains. This effect is weaker among firms with stronger technological reputations and more pronounced in regions where certification is widespread. Paradoxically, while certifications enhance access to resources that support innovation, they may also induce reputational effects that prompt firms to prioritize predictable outcomes and constrain technological search. We conducted in-depth interviews that further illuminate how these reputational dynamics take hold and shape firms’ innovation search strategies in practice.

This paper investigates how constraints on employee mobility affect the joint development of technologies by firms. Specifically, we focus on collaborative activities that lead to shared intellectual property (IP) rights. To obtain exogenous variation in mobility patterns, we exploit a natural experiment provided by the adoption/rejection of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) by different U.S. state courts. Building on the concepts of portable human and social capital, we propose that mobility constraints will negatively impact the extent to which firms successfully identify and pursue opportunities that result in jointly owned IP. Employing a difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis in a matched sample of treated and control firms, we find support for this hypothesis. This negative effect is weaker for firms that are embedded in technology clusters. We also find that, in the presence of mobility constraints, firms central in the knowledge network experience a sharper decrease in the number of co-patents. Yet, our results also show that centrally positioned firms are more likely to leverage local knowledge externalities that emerge in clusters to identify and pursue collaborations. We conceptualize this ambivalent effect as “the dual role of knowledge centrality.” 

This paper examines the impact of R&D divestment decisions, particularly the closure of corporate labs, on the routines of knowledge workers and the firm's ability to retain and utilize the knowledge produced by inventors who have been displaced as a result. We employ a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to compare technologies created by inventors in closed labs with similar inventions conceived within the firm by inventors stationed in labs that have continued operations. Building on the knowledge based view, we propose that lab closures lead to disruptions in the organizational and social contexts that are deeply embedded in the firm's and inventors' routines. Our results reveal a significant decline in the firm's reliance on knowledge created by inventors of closed labs post-closure. This negative impact is amplified for inventors who have established numerous connections with other inventors within the firm. This effect is only observed for relationships with inventors external to the lab; popularity within the closed lab does not appear to affect the extent to which an inventor's technologies are incorporated in the firm's subsequent inventions.