CAREER: TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND KNOWLEDGE CREATION

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

CAREER: Technological Innovation and Knowledge Creation The aim of this research agenda is to advance our understanding of technological innovation and the knowledge creation that makes it possible. Scientists from a wide range of disciplines study innovation and knowledge creation, making this an inherently interdisciplinary topic. This set of research projects seeks to exploit that interdisciplinarity by leveraging theoretical and empirical insights across domains. By building "bridges" between the different disciplines that study innovation and knowledge creation, this research seeks to tap synergies between them. The first stream focuses on technology standards. It includes projects that examine the tradeoffs between monopoly costs and network externalities, and the impact of standards ownership on technological innovation. The second stream is on modularity, and includes projects that build a taxonomy of types of modularity, examine how flexible organizational forms impact performance, and how the concept of modularity can be applied to knowledge networks. The third stream focuses on learning and knowledge creation, and includes projects that apply recent "small-world" network findings to knowledge networks, and in doing so, explore how knowledge network structure can influence creativity and innovation at the individual, group, and interfirm levels. Each of these streams has strong connections to each other, for example, technology standards enable modularity in product designs, and modularity in knowledge networks may promote cognitive insight and faster learning. By building on these connections, the agenda seeks to merge these research streams over time to create a much deeper understanding of how knowledge is created, and how that enables meaningful innovation.