Séminaire GREDEG : Raffaele MINIACI (University of Brescia -Italy)

Title : Exploration in research teams: Building on the shoulders of PhD students.

Abstract: Exploration is a critical input for creativity and innovation. This paper aims to investigate how the innovator and her team’s exploration activities boost the innovator’s performance. In our empirical context, the innovator is a French professor at the university, and her team consists of her PhD students. We study 15,401 research teams, led by an equivalent number of supervisors, and assess the similarity of their research outcomes using text analysis. Supervisors and students can explore by investigating research subjects that have not been previously investigated by the supervisor. Moreover, the direction of their exploration can be more or less aligned. Our regression analyses find that both supervisor and students’ exploration activities play a role in determining the supervisor’s performance, as measured by publication quantity, impact, and novelty. We show that an optimal combination of exploration activities and alignment yields considerably higher supervisor performance compared to the average. Our results support the idea that the exploration activity conducted by PhD students is of paramount relevance to the performance of their supervisors, who should pay great attention when assigning thesis topics.