Greater job mobility among engineers and scientists has caused the extended social networks of inventors to become increasingly connected. As a result, invention increasingly occurs within small worlds (or social networks) that straddle firm boundaries. Small worlds provide both strategic...

Are lone inventors more or less likely to invent breakthroughs' Recent research has attempted to resolve this question by considering the variance of creative outcome distributions. It has implicitly assumed a symmetric thickening or thinning of both tails, that a greater probability of...

Where are the ultimate sources of technological breakthroughs? What makes a firm more likely to invent a breakthrough or to exploit external breakthroughs? We develop an evolutionary model of invention as a process of recombinant variation and selection. Our contributions are to highlight the...