Colloq at noon, 9. July 2025: " Contribution-based inequality in inventor teams: A double-edged sword" by Martin Kalthaus

Lecture by Martin Kalthaus (University of Southern Denmark)

We provide first insights on the factors that influence an individual’s quantitative contribution in inventive activity and its consequences on team performance. Drawing on invention disclosures from a mid-sized German university, we show that a higher position in the academic hierarchy correlates with a smaller quantitative contribution to an invention. This division of inventive labor translates into team performance. The inequality of contributions in an inventor team has a positive correlation with the technological and economic value of the invention. However, opposing non-linearities exist: too much inequality reduces technological value but dominating inventors increase commercialization likelihood.

Martin Kalthaus is associate professor at the Center for Integrative Innovation Management at the Department of Business and Management at the University of Southern Denmark. He received a PhD from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) in economics and was visiting Scholar at SCANCOR, Stanford (U.S.). His research focuses on knowledge generation, its exchange, and application with a focus on sustainable technologies and science-industry interaction.

The INCHER lectures 2025 are hybrird events.
If you wish to participate via Zoom please register at koch[at]incher.uni-kassel[dot]de

Venue: INCHER, University of Kassel, meeting room 4102, Mönchebergstraße 17
34125 Kassel