Filling the Gap: The Consequences of Collaborator Loss in Corporate R&D

• Authors: Matthias Dorner, Felix Poege, Dietmar Harhoff, Karin Hoisl and Fabian Gaessler.
• Management Science, June, 2025.

We examine how collaborator loss affects the individual productivity of knowledge workers in corporate research and development (R&D). Specifically, we argue that the effect of such loss depends on whether the lost collaborator was internal or external to the organization, which may have compensatory measures in place to maintain the continuity of R&D efforts. To empirically investigate the effect of internal and external collaborator loss, we leverage 845 unexpected deaths of active inventors. We find a substantial negative effect on inventive productivity for the loss of external collaborators, particularly when the collaborator was of presumably high relevance to the remaining inventor. In contrast, the effect for the loss of internal collaborators is virtually zero. We show that the organization’s knowledge management and hiring capabilities are instrumental in explaining the muted effect of internal collaborator loss.