Collective knowledge and the associated concepts of collectively learning, remembering and inventing are increasingly important in today’s economy and society. Completing knowledge work alone is more and more difficult for individuals. Based on novel data sets which identify founders as inventors on patents and survey data collected from senior management, the author investigates questions about knowledge processing. What determines whether dispersed specialist knowledge can be located and used to complete tasks or to create new knowledge? How are social interactions organized and to what extent do individuals such as founders influence the course of action taken by the system as a whole?