Investigating the antecedents of general purpose technologies

This study analyzes how general purpose technologies are developed within the green energy field, by examining the relationship between search breadth across diverse knowledge domains and the technological generality of the resulting inventions. Particularly, we investigate if this relationship is moderated by the R&D team composition, focusing on size and degree of geographic dispersion across countries. Based on a sample of 88,748 green energy patents, we demonstrate that search breadth is curvilinearly related to an invention’s technological generality, and that large and dispersed teams allow organizations to benefit from a wider search breadth.