Human Capital Law and Innovation Policy

This is a thrilling week for Talent Wants to Be Free. As Matt alerted our readers earlier this month, Concurring Opinions is holding a weeklong symposium about the book. I hope you all jump in on the conversation and I am cross-posting my initial post here and there to jumpstart the exchange.

I am incredibly honored and grateful to all the participants of the symposium and especially to Deven Desai for putting it all together. It’s only Monday morning, the first official day of the symposium, and there are already a half a dozen fantastic posts up, all of which offer so much food for thought and so much to respond to. Wow! Before posting responses to the various themes and comments raised in the reviews, I wanted to write a more general introductory post to describe the path, motivation, and goals of writing the book.

Talent Wants to Be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids and Free Riding comes at a moment in time in which important developments in markets and research have coincided, pushing us to rethink innovation policy and our approaches to human capital. First, the talent wars are fiercer than ever and the mindset of talent control is rising. The stats about the rise of restrictions over human capital across industries and professions are dramatic.  Talent poaching is global, acquisition marathons increasingly focus on the people and their skills and potential for innovation as much as they look at the existing intellectual property of the company. And corporate espionage is the subject of heated international debates. Second, as a result of critical mass of new empirical studies coming out of business schools, law, psychology, economics, geography, we know so much more today compared to just a few years ago about what supports and what hinders innovation. The theories and insights I develop in the book attempt to bring together my behavioral research and economic analysis of employment law, including my experimental studies about the effects of non-competes on motivation, my theoretical and collaborative experimental studies about employee loyalty and institutional incentives, and my scholarship about the changing world of work, along with theories about endogenous growth and agglomeration economies by leading economists, such as Paul Romer and Michael Porter, and new empieircal field studies by management scholars such as Mark Garmaise, Olav Sorenson, Sampsa Samila, Matt Marx, and Lee Fleming. Third, as several of the posts point out, these are exciting times because legislatures and courts are actually interested in thinking seriously about innovation policy and have become more receptive to new evidence about the potential for better reforms.

As someone who teaches and writes in the fields of employment law, I wrote the book in the hopes that we can move beyond what I viewed as a stale conversation that framed these issues of non-competes, worker mobility, trade secrets and ownership over ideas  as labor versus business; protectionism versus free markets (as is often the case with other key areas of my research such as whistleblowing and discrimination). A primary goal was to shift the debate to include questions about how human capital law affects competitiveness and growth more generally. Writing about work policy, my first and foremost goal is to understand the nature of work in its many evolving iterations. Often in these debates we get sidetracked. While we have an active ongoing debate about the right scope of intellectual property, under the radar human capital controls have been expanding, largely without serious public conversation. My hope has been to encourage broad and sophisticated exchanges between legal scholars, policymakers, business leaders, investors, and innovators.

And still, there is so much more to do! The participants of the symposium are pushing me forward with next steps. The exchanges this week will certainly help crystalize a lot of the questions that were beyond the scope of the single book and several new projects are already underway. I will mention in closing a couple of other colleagues who have written about the book elsewhere and hope they too will join in the conversation. These include a thoughtful review by Raizel Liebler on The Learned FanGirl, a Q&A with CO’s Dan Solove, and other advance reviews here. Once again, let me say how grateful and appreciative I am to all the participants. Nothing is more rewarding.