As executives face businesses that are more or less profitable they often respond by moving resources between businesses. But which specific resources do they move? We study innovation active firms and their decisions to redeploy inventors between business units. Examining the US petrochemical industry, we find that generalist inventors (vs specialists in few domains) are more likely to be redeployed, while brokers (i.e., inventors who connect others) in the collaboration network are less likely to be redeployed. In addition, conditions that alter opportunity costs at the source unit matter. When there are larger proportions of generalists (and brokers), this facilitates redeployment of that type of inventor, and knowledge interdependencies in the source unit mitigate redeployment to a target unit.