An alter-centric perspective on focal inventor’s innovation: The importance of new collaborators’ attributes

The entry of new collaborators is a common and important phenomenon in organizational innovation. However, it remains unclear what effect new collaborators have on focal inventors’ innovation and which types of new collaborators are most beneficial for enhancing innovation performance. To address this gap, this study adopts a dynamic network perspective to examine the impact of new collaborator entry on the innovation of focal inventors. Furthermore, this study adopts an alter-centric perspective to analyze how the productivity, centrality, and structural holes of new collaborators, including their differences from focal inventors, moderate this relationship. Using patent data from Huawei and ZTE between 2004 and 2021, this study empirically tested the proposed hypotheses. The results show that the new collaborators’ entry enhances the innovation performance of focal inventors. This positive effect increases when new collaborators exhibit higher productivity and centrality, while their structural holes have no significant moderating impact. However, large differences between new collaborators and focal inventors in these attributes decrease the beneficial effect of new collaborator entry on focal inventors’ innovation.