When Do R&D Employees Engage in Bottom-Up Inventions?

Corporate R&D employees often engage in voluntary inventive activities that lie beyond the scope and requirements of formal R&D projects. While these “bottom-up” inventions can significantly benefit firms, the factors prompting R&D employees to engage in such behavior remain less explored. Conceiving bottom-up invention as an exploratory search beyond formal projects and drawing on the literature on individual-level search, we investigate how employees’ productivity in formal R&D projects influences their propensity to initiate bottom-up inventions. Specifically, we propose a U-shaped relationship where both low and high productivity in R&D projects spur employees to venture outside their project boundaries and engage in bottom-up inventive activities. We further examine the moderating effect of the availability of related R&D projects as well as how productivity in R&D projects influences the technological distance of bottom-up inventions from R&D projects. Utilizing a unique dataset from a large R&D-intensive company, we find supportive evidence for the hypotheses. Our findings contribute to the literature on creative proactivity and the microfoundations of organizational search, and offer insights for managers to harness this behavior by providing a deeper understanding of the triggers behind bottom-up inventions in corporate environments.