When Do Expert Teams Fail to Create Impactful Inventions?

Date01 September 2019
Published date01 September 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12447
© 2019 The Authors. Jour nal of Manageme nt Studies publis hed by Society for the Adva ncement of Managment Stud ies
and John Wiley & S ons Ltd.
When Do Expert Teams Fail to Create Impactful
Inventions?
Simon J. D. Schillebeeckx, Yimin Lin and Gerard George
Singapore Ma nageme nt Universit y
ABST RACT We investigate the sal ience of expertise in creating h igh impact inventions and
question experts’ abi lity to deploy novel ideas. Specifica lly, we examine t he relationships be-
tween expert ise, component originality, and a team’s structur al holes’ position in the collabora-
tive network and propose that , in relative terms, expert tea ms create lower impact inventions
if they deploy more origi nal components and if they occupy struct ural holes. We test and
confir m our hypotheses in a sample of semiconductor fi rms. In post-hoc analyses, we f ind a
three-way interact ion where the negative effect of structura l holes almost disappears when an
expert team ex periments with origina l components whereas an increase in non-redundancy
is detrimenta l when teams w ith high ex pertise use famili ar components. Our findings i nform
a foundational view of t he invention process and prov ide novel insights into the contingent
benefits of domai n expertise.
Keywo rds: component origin ality, expertise, inventor teams, patents, s tructural holes
INTRODUCTION
During their c areers, inventors acquire knowledge, make discoveries, develop new ideas,
and create inventions. In doing so, they develop expert ise within a nd across domains.
In general, multi-level research f inding s have established positive effects of expertise
on invention-related outcomes. For individual actors, experience with spec ific technol-
ogies or products is positively lin ked to learning (Chri stensen et al., 2001; Johnson and
Russo, 1984), for team actors, experience with patenting positively i nfluences the li ke-
lihood that a patent is a breakth rough invention (Kaplan and Vakili , 2015; Singh and
Fleming, 2010), for organizational actors, prior experience boosts l ikelihood of engaging
Journal of Man agement Studi es 56:6 September 2019
doi:10. 1111/j om s. 124 47
Address for re prints: Lee Kong Chi an School of Busines s, Singapore Ma nagement University, 50 Stamford
Road, Singapore 178899 (ggeorge@smu.edu.sg).
This is an op en access article under the t erms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution Licen se, which
permits use, d istribution and reproduct ion in any medium, provided the or iginal work is properly cite d.
1074 S. J. D. Schillebeeckx et a l.
© 2019 The Authors. Jour nal of Manageme nt Studies publis hed by Society for the Adva ncement of Managment Stud ies
and John Wiley & S ons Ltd.
in impactful tech nology development (Stuart and Podolny, 1996), and for industry ac-
tors, experience with tech nological components relates positively to t he impact of inven-
tions that recombine those components (Flemi ng, 2001).
Such findings provide support for the so-called ‘foundational view’ which proffers
that inventing requires the identification of anomalies or inconsistencies in a knowledge
domain and that this identification is almost impossible without a foundational under-
standing of a domain’s underlying assumptions, weaknesses, and strengths (Kaplan and
Vakili, 2015; Weisberg, 1999). An opposing view of invention however suggests that
deep expertise may ‘entrench’ actors into narrow ways of thinking, limiting creativity,
and eventually reducing novelty and/or impact (Audia and Goncalo, 2007; Dane, 2010;
George et al., 2008; Kaplan and Vakili, 2015). This problem may be exacerbated for
teams, especially if team members work together on multiple projects because repeated
prior collaboration may further entrench their ways of working, limit perspective-
taking, and reduce creative abrasion, thus undermining the ability to generate truly novel
ideas (Hoever et al., 2012; Skilton and Dooley, 2010). Given these opposing schools of
thought, our research questions whether it is possible for there to be too much expertise
and if so, whether teams can avoid such competency traps by integrating original ideas in
their inventions (Siggelkow and Levinthal, 2005)? Our theoretical arguments suggest that
expert teams underperform when they are strongly exposed to original content, either
in terms of the knowledge components they use, or in terms of non-redundancy in the
collaboration network. We examine this issue in a sample of over 40,000 patents of 105
US semiconductor firms and make three contributions to the literature.
First, we ask whether teams with high domain expertise are better or worse at de-
ploying original knowledge components, a form of exploration, than teams with less
expertise. While some have claimed that ‘near consensus exists on the need for balance’
between explorative and exploitative search (Gupta et al., 2006, p. 967), the entrench-
ment view stipulates that distant search is needed to break out of the narrow trenches of
expertise and avoid competency traps (Leonard-Barton, 1992; Siggelkow and Levinthal,
2005). For instance, Jung and Lee (2016) established a strong link between original search
and invention impact. The foundational view on the other hand posits that local search,
through its strong relation with the likelihood of cognitive breakthroughs, positively af-
fects invention impact (Kaplan and Vakili, 2015). Unlike Jung and Lee (2016), we find
a negative effect of knowledge originality and postulate that teams with high domain
expertise benefit less from using original knowledge than teams with less expertise. Our
findings confirm this hypothesis.
Our second contribution establishes non-redundancy in the social network as a bound-
ary condition for expertise’s effect on invention impact. In doing so, we contribute to a
growing literature on the contingent effects of inventor networks on invention outcomes
(Guan and Liu, 2016; Paruchuri and Awate, 2017; Wang et al., 2014). We investigate
how a team’s structural holes’ position in the inventor network influences the contribu-
tion of expertise to the generation of impactful inventions. While such a position has
typically been found to boost search and exploration, its effect on invention impact is less
clear-cut (Ahuja, 2000; Guan and Liu, 2016). Stepping away from the purely ‘structural-
ist’ perspective (Carnabuci and Diószegi, 2015), we proffer that structural holes may be
considered substitutes for domain expertise, consequently we anticipate an antagonistic
When Do Expert Teams Fail to Create Impactfu l Inventions? 1075
© 2019 The Authors. Jour nal of Manageme nt Studies publis hed by Society for the Adva ncement of Managment Stud ies
and John Wiley & S ons Ltd.
relationship between both predictors (Andersson et al., 2014), which is confirmed in our
findings.
A third contribution stems from a post-hoc analysis that focuses on how both con-
tingencies interact. Because both original components and structural holes can be in-
terpreted as sources of novelty, it may be so that combining them imposes excessive
cognitive difficulty on teams, making them substitutes, or that they can complement one
another, e.g., when a non-redundant prior collaborator can help illuminate the use cases
of an original knowledge component. We find empirical evidence of this three-way in-
teraction and discuss how this finding adds boundary conditions to our focal hypotheses.
Expert teams that are connected to non-redundant ties in the social network and use
highly original components significantly underperform those that are either less con-
nected or those that use more familiar components. Overall, expert teams that use famil-
iar components and are not connected to non-redundant ties create the highest impact
inventions. As such, our paper provides strong support for the foundational view that sees
creativity and successful invention as processes that require both high levels of expertise
and a within-domain search focus, rather than as an outcome of boundary-spanning,
multi-disciplinary search.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Through a combination of deliberate practice, implicit and ex plicit learning, inventors
amass sign ificant knowledge in a doma in. Accumulating such knowledge takes time
and is susceptible to time compression diseconomies, which makes it valuable and hard
to imitate (Bar ney, 1991; Dierickx and Cool, 1989). Once suff icient knowledge in a
particular domain is mastered, we can say the inventor has become an expert and her
expertise, def ined as ‘a high level of domain-specific knowledge acqui red through expe-
rience’, sets her apart from others (Dane, 2010, p. 580). Domain experts have a broad
knowledge scope, in terms of the quantity of d iverse components within a focal domai n
that they master, and have an in-depth underst anding of the variety of ways and the in-
tensity with which t hese components are interlinked ( Dane, 2010). But scope alone is not
enough for true expertise, for inventors to be truly successf ul, they also require signif i-
cant knowledge depth (Boh et al., 2014). By combining deep and broad knowledge, ex-
pertise underpins absorptive capacity and architectural competence that enable teams
to recombine components to achieve inventive success (Henderson and Clark, 1990).
Given these strengths of domai n expertise, we question whether there are constra ints to
experts’ abilities to recombine k nowledge components into impactful inventions.
Specifically, because novelty creation is essential to the inventive process, our focal re-
search question asks whether expert teams are better or worse at turning original knowl-
edge into successful inventions. Because firms, teams, and inventors are embedded in
collaborative and knowledge component networks within which they search for ideas
and solutions to problems (Guan and Liu, 2016; Kotha et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2014),
we conceive of original knowledge in two complementary ways: original knowledge
components taken from the knowledge component network, and original ideas accessed
through their structurally advantageous position in the collaboration network. Teams
can focus on reusing familiar components that are well-understood in the industry and

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