A New Look at National Diversity of Inventor Teams within Organizations

Mobile talent brings different expertise, perspectives, knowledge, and experience into an organization. With a diversity of views, organizations can obtain new ideas that help improve research and development. National diversity can be deemed to represent the mobile talent within an organization, which might increase innovation. Organizations with national diversity are more innovative. Performance is generally based on collaboration between domestic and international talent, which provides the opportunity to capture benefits from the knowledge transfer effect. Most studies on national diversity generally take a headcount of countries on an organizational basis to calculate the National Diversity Index; however, this approach fails to reveal the contribution of knowledge transfer between domestic/international inventor team collaborations. In this study, the authors propose an index, which includes two parts, in which values are assigned based on domestic/international collaboration and international/international collaboration. The index can determine the level of national diversity. The authors further provided a mechanism for visualizing the diversity of inventor teams. An empirical analysis that focuses on the pharmaceutical industry was conducted to test the proposed model.