We draw on upper-echelons literature recognizing the important role of CEOs in firm strategy, including innovation, and research on CEO political ideology and executive discretion to explore the relationship between CEO political ideology and firm breakthrough inventions. We suggest that CEO liberalism is a double-edged sword and is positively associated with firm breakthrough inventions but also less-useful inventions. We suggest that these relationships are shaped by three different sources of executive discretion: CEO-TMT pay gap, institutional investors, and existing product-market competition. We find support for our hypotheses on a sample of 581 public firms using firms’ patenting and citation activities to capture inventions. We infuse a values, contingency-based perspective to work on CEO characteristics and firm breakthrough inventions, provide a more comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature of managerial discretion in setting or deviating firms on/from certain technological trajectories, and extend work on political ideology by showing the relevance of political ideology for explaining not just variations in firm internal resource allocation decisions, corporate activism, and entrepreneurship but also in the level and nature of inventions it produces.
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