La Strategic Management Society premia un PhD Bocconi

Una delle più recenti attestazioni della qualità della Scuola di Dottorato Bocconi è stato l'SMS Best Conference PhD Paper Prize vinto da Raffaele Conti, un recente diplomato in Business Administration and Management, ora assistant professor alla Catolica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, alla 31st Strategic Management Society Annual International Conference (Miami, 6-9 novembre 2011).

Il paper di Conti, Do Non-Competition Agreements Lead Firms to Pursue Path-Breaking Inventions?, è stato uno dei cinque vincitori del premio.

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.