This article extends research on the relationship between employee mobility and firm performance by exploring how mobility between competitors and mobility between potential cooperators are different. We draw on social capital theory to argue that movement of employees both to and from clients may enhance firm performance, whereas only inward mobility from competitors benefits firms. We also hypothesize that it is more harmful for firms to lose social capital-laden human assets to competitors than to other potential employee destinations. We tested our hypotheses with a novel dyadic data set of patent attorney movements between law firms and Fortune 500 companies.

Settlement outcomes in patent litigation are modeled as resulting from strategies pursued by firms with their patented technologies. Hypotheses are derived for two types of influences: the use of patents as isolating mechanisms to protect valuable strategic stakes, and their ‘defensive’ role in obtaining access to external technologies through mutual hold‐up. Parameter estimates from a sample selection probit model provide support for the strategic stakes hypotheses, while the evidence for mutual hold‐up is inconclusive. Interindustry comparisons show that nonsettlement of patent suits in both research medicines and computers is increased by strategic stakes and, in addition, mutual hold‐up appears to play an important role in computer patent suits. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

W hereas capability differences are known to impact governance decisions, what drives heterogeneity in firm capabilities? We propose that capability differences may arise from governance choices related to the focal activity and study how firms accumulate capabilities in the firm-specific, industry-specific, and occupational human capital necessary to perform knowledge work. We theorize that prior outsourcing decisions influence the development of firm-and industryspecific human capital and that buyer-supplier differences in the management of skilled employees can produce systematic differences in capabilities based on occupational human capital. Additionally, we explore some contingencies in the development of these types of human capital and their impacts on outsourcing knowledge work. These propositions are tested with a unique data set on the outsourcing of legal work involved in filing patents (i.e., patent prosecution).

Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV), this paper examines how the combination or bundling of resources influences firm-patenting performance. We hypothesize that firm-patenting output depends not only on research and development (R&D) resources, but also on the patent law expertise combined with R&D inside the firm. We predict that the specialization of this in-house legal resource to R&D enables firms to identify patentable inventions more effectively and to convert them into patents. We also argue that there may be a positive complementary relationship between patent law expertise and R&D, such that patent law expertise will have a larger effect on patent output when it is deployed with matching higher levels of R&D. Furthermore, we predict that the effect of internal patent law expertise on firm patenting will be moderated by organization- and industry-level contextual factors. To test our hypotheses, we examine the patenting performance of a sample of Fortune 500 firms from 1990 to 2000. Results suggest that in-house patent law expertise is a significant predictor of firm-patenting performance; furthermore, this effect is moderated by the firm's level of top management team (TMT) patent law background and industry-patenting pressures. However, our hypothesis of a complementary relationship between patent law expertise and R&D was not supported; instead, we found evidence of a counterintuitive (weak) negative interaction between these two variables. Our findings shed light on how the combination of other resources with R&D affects firm-patenting performance, and advance the integration of complementary organizational perspectives with the RBV.

We examine why exclusivity provisions are used in licensing alliances, and when restrictions in licensing scope (e.g., by product or geography) accompany these exclusivity provisions. We find broad support for the proposition that these features are associated with the contractual challenges of allying with licensees when they contribute valuable complementary capabilities toward the commercialization of licensed technologies. Evidence from our data suggests that exclusivity is used as a contractual hostage to safeguard licensee investments in complementary assets and to enable contracting over early stage technologies. Scope restrictions are employed to balance the tradeoffs between the value creation made possible by licensee complementary capabilities and the transactional hazards entailed in working exclusively with licensees. Our results also suggest that scope restrictions and other formal safeguards may be substitute mechanisms for managing similar transactional concerns in licensing alliances. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.