Young, Restless and Creative: Openness to Disruption and Creative Innovations

Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit and Murat Celik

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: This paper argues that openness to new, unconventional and disruptive ideas has a .first-order impact on creative innovations - innovations that break new ground in terms of knowledge creation. After presenting a motivating model focusing on the choice between incremental and radical innovation, and on how managers of different ages and human capital are sorted across different types of .firms, we provide cross-country, firm-level and patent-level evidence consistent with this pattern. Our measures of creative innovations proxy for innovation quality (average number of citations per patent) and creativity (fraction of superstar innovators, the likelihood of a very high number of citations, and generality of patents). Our main proxy for openness to disruption is manager age. This variable is based on the idea that only companies or societies open to such disruption will allow the young to rise up within the hierarchy. Using this proxy at the country, .firm or patent level, we present robust evidence that openness to disruption is associated with more creative innovations.

Keywords: corporate culture; creative destruction; creativity; economic growth; entrepreneurship; individualism; innovation; openness to disruption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O33 O40 O43 P10 P16 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2014-02-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-ent, nep-gro, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-knm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (68)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Young, Restless and Creative: Openness to Disruption and Creative Innovations (2014)
Working Paper: Young, Restless and Creative: Openness to Disruption and Creative Innovations (2014)
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