Leaky mess or safety vaults? Team knowledge production and post-mobility knowledge spillover

Teams have become the primary unit for organizing knowledge production. While existing research has extensively investigated whether and how teams enhance knowledge production, it has paid scant attention to their role in safeguarding against knowledge spillover following inventor mobility. The literature presents conflicting arguments on this issue. Drawing on team innovation research, we contend that team production generates two types of knowledge: task-specific knowledge and metaknowledge. Task-specific knowledge is economically valuable and is fragmented among co-inventors, so that its risk of post-mobility knowledge spillover is lower when it is produced by larger teams. While metaknowledge is shared within the team and prone to mobility-induced spillover, it has limited value with the corresponding task-specific knowledge. Analyzing a sample of mobility events among industrial inventors using a within-event design, we find that knowledge produced by larger teams is more resistant to post-mobility spillover, being significantly less likely to be utilized by the destination firm. This protective effect is attenuated when co-inventors co-move and when the knowledge is inherently complex. Our study contributes to the literature on team innovation and inventor mobility by underscoring the role of team production in knowledge protection in the context of inventor mobility.