CEO individualism and corporate innovation

Purpose This paper aims to study the impact of CEOs' cultural background on corporate innovation. The paper constructs a measure of CEOs' cultural individualism based on their birthplaces and investigates its relationship with firms' patents and citations. The study aims to shed light on the interaction of culture and corporate decisions and focuses on the role of top managers. The paper also investigates the mechanism of how top management can affect corporate innovation output. Design/methodology/approach The paper constructs the measure of individualism using the westward expansion in US history. To do so, the paper uses the US county-level duration of exposure of the frontier territory in the 19th century and links the counties to CEOs' birthplaces. The paper argues the cultural characteristics of birthplaces can affect a person's later management styles and decisions, hence affecting corporate innovation policies. Using regression and difference-in-differences estimations, the paper explores the relation and causality between cultural individualism and innovation output. Findings The paper finds that CEO cultural individualism is positively related with the number of patents produced by the firm and the citations received by the firm. Difference-in-differences tests using CEO turnovers support that the relation is causal. The paper also investigates the economic mechanism of how individualistic CEOs achieve such results. It finds that individualistic CEOs tend to hire more talented employees and improve the workplace environment to attract top inventors. Originality/value This paper provides firm-level evidence of culture and innovation. Prior studies in this area focus on cross-country evidence and suffer the limitation of confounding factors. Using a county-level measure of individualism and a sample of firms in USA, the paper alleviates the concern and provides evidence with better granularity. This paper also provides a novel mechanism for attracting top inventors, while existing literature tend to focus on risk-taking activities.