Abstract

Complex systems research and network science have recently been used to provide novel insights into economic phenomena such as patenting behavior and innovation in firms. Several studies have found that increased mobility of inventors, manifested through firm switching or transitioning, is associated with increased overall productivity. This paper proposes a novel structural study of such transitioning inventors, and the role they play in patent co-authorship networks, in a cohort of highly innovative and economically influential companies such as the five Big Tech firms (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta) in the post-recession period (2010--2022). We formulate and empirically investigate three research questions using Big Tech patent data. Our results show that transitioning inventors tend to have higher degree centrality than the average Big Tech inventor, and that their removal can lead to greater …

Date

July 18, 2025

Authors

Yidan Sun, Mayank Kejriwal

Conference

ASONAM '23: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining

Pages

670–677