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Boundary-Crossing Job Mobility. Gina Dokko UC Davis, Graduate School of Management OSWC XIX February 9, 2013. Job mobility as a way of spanning knowledge communities. Your experiences make you who you are and determine what you can do
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Boundary-Crossing Job Mobility Gina Dokko UC Davis, Graduate School of Management OSWC XIX February 9, 2013
Job mobility as a way of spanning knowledge communities • Your experiences make you who you are and determine what you can do • Participants in knowledge communities hold knowledge, and are also embedded in the social and cognitive worlds of their communities • Carry this stuff when they move • But you can’t escape from your past • Individuals carry cognitive and behavioral baggage when they move • Frame job mobility or career history as boundary-crossing events that enable individuals to span or connect knowledge communities • Whether they want to or not
Questions • What’s being carried? • Knowledge, social ties, norms, mental models • Heterogeneity in experience? • What are the outcomes? • Learning, social networks, innovation, performance • For individuals, firms, nations • Can job mobility overcome challenges of sharing knowledge over distance? • What boundaries? • Org, occupation/profession, industry, other knowledge communities? • How do these boundaries interact?
Challenges • Cross-level effects • Teasing apart knowledge, social ties, other stuff • Gathering and coding career history
Boundary-Crossing Job Mobility, New Product Area Entry and the Performance of Entrepreneurial Ventures (Dokko & Wu) • Entrepreneurial leaders come to new ventures with experience • Serial entrepreneurs: direct experience • But for many, it’s their first venture, but not their first work experience • Aside from direct experience in founding firms, how does their prior experience affect the outcomes of their new ventures? • “Related” experience, but what bundle of knowledge and skills matters to entrepreneurship? • Industry and functional boundary crossing
Sample of multi-industry high tech firms (CorpTech) • Identify mobility events: people moving from one CorpTech firm to another • Proportion of industries that differ (CorpTech product codes at the industry level) • Proportion of functional responsibilities that differ (CorpTech functional areas)
Crossing different types of KC boundaries has different effects • Industryboundary-crossing • Negatively associated with startup performance • Not associated with entry into new product areas • But it does appear to enable IPOs (if the firm doesn’t fail) • Functional boundary-crossing • Positively associated with entry into new product areas • Not associated with startup performance