Measuring spillover effects from defense to civilian sectors - a quantitative approach using linkedIn/ Thea Riebe, Stefka Schmid & Christian Reuter

Spillover effects describe the process of a company benefiting from the R&D activities of another one and thereby gaining an economic advantage. One prominent approach for measuring spillover effects is based on the analysis of patent citation networks. Taking social media analytics and knowledge economics into account, this paper presents a complementary approach to quantify spillover effects from defense to civilian research and development, analyzing 513 employment biographies from the social network LinkedIn. Using descriptive network analysis, we investigate the emigration of personnel of the German defense industry to other civilian producers. Thereby, our study reveals that in the last decade, employees of defense suppliers have changed positions significantly less often, with 3.24 changes on average than professionals who have worked more than 50% of their jobs in the civilian sector, having changed 4.61 times on average. Our work illustrates the churn behavior and how spillover effects between defense and civilian sectors can be measured using social career networks such as LinkedIn.

ECONOMICS