A Fresh PhD School Graduate Awarded by Strategic Management Society

One of the most recent acknowledgements of the quality of Bocconi PhD School has been the SMS Best Conference PhD Paper Prize obtained by Raffaele Conti, a recent graduate in Business Administration and Management, currently assistant professor at Catolica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, at the 31st Strategic Management Society Annual International Conference (Miami, November 6-9, 2011).

Do Non-Competition Agreements Lead Firms to Pursue Path-Breaking Inventions?, Conti's paper, was one of the five recipients of the award.

Abstract: This study investigates the impact of non-competition agreements on the type of R&D activity undertaken by companies. Non-competition agreements, by reducing outbound mobility and knowledge leakages to competitors, make high-risk R&D projects relatively more valuable than low-risk ones. Thus they induce companies to choose riskier R&D projects, such that corporate inventions are more likely to lie in the tails of the inventions' value distribution (as breakthroughs or failures), and to be in novel technological areas. This study uses data about U.S. patent applications between 1990 and 2000 and considers both cross-state and longitudinal variation in the enforcement of non-compete clauses. Results indicate that in states with stricter enforcement, companies undertake riskier R&D paths than in states that do not enforce non-compete agreements as strictly.