Measuring Spillover Effects from Defense to Civilian Sectors –A Quantitative Approach Using LinkedIn

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Spillover
• dual-use
• LinkedIn
• social media analytics
• JEL: O33, H56

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Julian Kessel for his contribution in discussing the motivation, state of research and possible approaches towards measuring spillovers using LinkedIn data during an earlier stage of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Meunier and Bellais (2019) define technology as the ‘application of knowledge for practical ends’, implicating the foundational character of knowledge and its potential materialization into technology.

2. ThyssenKrupp has been ranked as the second most active German company in arms sales (Fleurant et al. 2017). Yet, as its share of arms sales in relation to total sales makes out ‘only’ 4% percent, the company mainly has a civilian profile. Hence, the sample was saturated before such additional inclusion, and we aimed for Hensoldt, Rheinmetall, and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, representing the German arms market in SIPRI’s Top 100.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Forum for Interdisciplinary Research (FIF) in the IANUS research fund for interdisciplinary research within the research project “IT research and development of concern” and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts within their joint support of the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE.