Certifications issued by authoritative institutions enhance organizational standing and facilitate access to resources for innovation. We argue, however, that when certification functions as a maintained status – a time-limited position contingent on continued compliance – the recurring evaluation required to preserve it generates conformity pressures that redirect innovation search toward familiar domains. Drawing on institutional theory, we show how ongoing monitoring and standardized evaluation criteria favor outcomes that are legible and verifiable within fixed review cycles. We further argue that these effects vary with firms’ technological prestige and the local institutionalization of certification. Studying China’s High and New-Technology Enterprise certification program using coarsened exact matching, an extended two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences design, and in-depth interviews, we find that certification reduces search in unfamiliar technological domains. This effect is attenuated among high-prestige firms and amplified where certification is widely institutionalized. These findings advance understanding of how evaluative regimes shape where firms search for new knowledge.

Trade secrets are among firms’ most valuable strategic assets, yet their consequences for interfirm collaboration remain underexplored. We argue that stronger trade secret enforcement raises the proprietary cost of the pre-contractual disclosures through which prospective partners identify and evaluate one another. As a result, stronger enforcement impedes the formation of collaborative partnerships. We test this argument by exploiting the staggered adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine across U.S. states as a quasi-experimental source of variation in trade secret enforceability, examining drug-development collaborations in the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry between 1980 and 2016. We find that stronger enforcement reduces within-state collaboration formation by 43%. The decline is concentrated in collaborations involving early-stage innovations, where signals of value are difficult to separate from the proprietary knowledge that generates them. By contrast, late-stage collaborations, where observable milestones convey value without exposing that knowledge, show no comparable decline. Overall, however, firms do not collaborate less. Ties to partners in non-adopting states increase by 74%, leaving total collaboration unchanged. Stronger enforcement thus redraws the geography of collaboration. These findings reveal an important tradeoff. While trade secrets help firms appropriate value from their inventions, strengthening their enforcement can impede the formation of the collaborations through which such inventions are developed and commercialized.

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.