Research on strategic human capital and resource redeployment emphasizes why firms would enable effective knowledge transfer and recombination via human capital redeployment. However, such benefits will likely depend on the redeployed individuals and their previous (collaboration) experiences in research and development (R&D) activities. In this paper, by focusing on the important role of redeployed individuals in knowledge transfer and recombination across geographic locations, we argue that previous collaboration productivity and solo-patenting experience are two critical indicators of successful human capital redeployment. Empirical analysis on matched individual-level patent data on inventors and their productivity at 545 U.S. technology firms supports potential detrimental performance implications of within-firm redeployment on redeployed individuals, suggesting the necessity of careful redeployment of human capital across geographic locations.
