Chicken, or the egg, or both? The interrelationship between a firm's inventor specialization and scope of technologies
研究了企业发明者专业化程度与技术范围之间的双向因果关系，发现更专业的发明者导致更窄的技术范围，而窄技术范围又促使发明者保持专业化，这对理解企业间资源与组织的同构与异质性有重要意义。
Firms with different scope of technologies experience different firm growth. Understanding such heterogeneity requires knowing not only what drives technologies' scope but also why these drivers remain different across firms. I propose inventor specialization as a driver of technologies' scope: firms with more specialized inventors create narrower scope technologies. I also propose that these narrower scope technologies themselves in turn induce these firms' inventors to remain more specialized. I empirically demonstrate this two‐way interrelationship in the U.S. communication equipment industry using policy shocks as natural experiments and a new measure of scope. This interrelationship has important implications for why resources and organization appear isomorphic within a firm but heterogeneous across firms . t © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.