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R&D investment, Innovation, Patents, University industry linkages, Matching methods, C24, L10, O30, O31, O38, 040,

This article studies how workforce composition is related to a firm's success in introducing radical innovations. Previous studies have argued that teams composed of individuals with diverse backgrounds are able to perform more information processing and make deeper use of the information, which is important to accomplish complex tasks. We suggest that this argument can be extended to the level of the aggregate workforce of high-technology firms. In particular, we argue that ethnic and higher education diversity within the workforce is associated with superior performance in radical innovation. Using a sample of 3,888 Swedish firms, this article demonstrates that having greater workforce diversity in terms of both ethnic background and educational disciplinary background is positively correlated to the share of a firm's turnover generated by radical innovation. Having more external collaborations does, however, seem to reduce the importance of educational background diversity. The impact of ethnic diversity is not affected by external collaboration. These findings hold after using alternative measures of dependent and independent variables, alternative sample sizes, and alternative estimation techniques. The research findings presented in this article would seem to have immediate and important practical implications. They would suggest that companies may pursue recruitment policies inspired by greater ethnic and disciplinary diversity as a way to boost the innovativeness of the organization. From a managerial perspective, it may be concluded that workforce disciplinary diversity could be potentially replaced by more external links, while ethnic diversity could not

This paper demonstrates that while ideals of close linkages between research and teaching are widely embraced in research-oriented universities, a practice of division of labour between teaching-oriented and research-oriented staff persists. In an investigation of how the research-teaching nexus is managed at three Swedish universities, we identify a perceived misalignment between institutional incentives for individual academic staff and the needs of teaching. Under pressure from such tensions, managers are forced to deploy pragmatic strategies for the staffing of undergraduate education tasks. This includes allowing research needs and agendas to take priority over teaching needs. While managers seek to secure the participation of senior researchers in education, they often actively prefer to delegate the bulk of teaching activities to less research-active staff. Such strategies seem to reinforce existing patterns of division of labour among academic staff.