Sparking Innovation: The Effect of Inventor Gender Diversity on Recombinant Innovation

Innovation, at its core, is a recombinant process that involves the blending of existing ideas to produce novel solutions. In this study, we examine the effect of gender diversity among patenting inventors on the recombinant intensity of firm innovation. To measure recombinant intensity, we propose an information artifact called SPaRK (Semantic Patent Recombinant Knowledge), which utilizes word embeddings from the patent text. We identify the impact of inventor gender diversity by leveraging the variation in the proportion of female graduate students entering the local inventor labor market as an instrumental variable. Using a multisource data set derived from 1.8 million patents across 4,769 firms spanning 23 years, we find that gender diversity among a firm’s inventors positively impacts: (1) the firm’s future recombinant innovation; (2) the firm’s future innovation quantity, quality, and labor efficiency; and (3) the future innovation productivity of female inventors at the firm. In other words, heightened gender diversity benefits both firms and the female inventors they employ. Our mediation analysis reveals that cross-gender collaborations serve as a crucial mechanism through which increased gender diversity translates into enhanced recombinant innovation. At the same time, we find that although inventor gender diversity is generally beneficial for recombinant innovation at firms, its marginal impact depends on how central female inventors already are in the knowledge network.

History: Ram Gopal, Senior Editor; Yixin Lu, Associate Editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2023.0343.