The DIV_INV project is funded by the Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Individual Fellowships program. It explores how the knowledge profiles of inventors relate to their productivity. On this page, you will find a short non-technical summary of the objectives of the project and updates about the output and activities related to the project.

The knowledge held by inventors and scientists is arguably the most important input to innovation. Yet, how knowledge built up by inventors affects the inventive process is scarcely understood. The main objective of the DIV_INV project is to collect evidence on how inventors' knowledge profiles relate to creative output. More specifically, it sheds light on the tension between the benefits of specialization and the costs of coordinating teamwork.

The project has three main scientific objectives. First, it seeks to understand to what extent diversity built up by teams of inventors can substitute for the diversity held by individual team members. Such substitutability is important to understand the potential friction brought about by the trend towards individual specialization and increased use of teamwork. If substitution is hard, this trend implies an important constraint on the production of knowledge, and therefore future productivity growth in the economy.

Second, the project asks whether policies that increase team breadth – i.e., the knowledge diversity attained through teamwork – are likely to be effective in spurring more innovation. Such policies are commonplace to increase the efficiency of public funding. Most funding strategies assume that promoting multidisciplinary teams – that is, broader ones – will increase the innovation output generated by a given subsidy. The project seeks to provide causal evidence on the justification of this assumption and the policies it implies.

A third objective is to understand the extent to which monetary incentives effectively induce field-switching by inventors. This question is important to study demand-side policies' effectiveness in supporting innovation. Most innovation support schemes effectively increase the demand for innovation by increasing innovator profits (usually by reducing R&D costs). Recent examples include support schemes to induce innovations that mitigate climate change, for instance by developing renewable energy innovations. However, the supply of inventors in a given field conditions the effectiveness of such demand-side policies. Innovation supply does not swiftly follow the demand if inventors are reluctant to switch to fields with higher monetary rewards. Understanding how financial incentives affect field-switching is key to informing policymakers.