Collaborative Research: Content, Structure, and Governance in an Innovation Networks: An Empirical Investigation

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

What factors make an innovation network effective? As both corporations and not-for-profit organizations increasingly embrace innovation networks, understanding how to manage such complex entities more effectively is crucial. However, given that the concept of an innovation network is a relatively recent phenomenon of interest in organization theory and strategy, the day-to-day mechanics of structuring and managing them optimally are yet to be fully explicated. The broader literature on organizational networks has focused on three primary elements: network structure (the pattern of interorganizational ties that constitute the network), network content (the resources that flow through the ties), and network governance (the set of formal and informal institutional and contractual ties that serve to keep the network functioning as a coherent whole). While each of these three elements is crucial to the effectiveness of an innovation network, they have hitherto been studied mostly in isolation from each other. In contrast, our primary research goal is to understand how network structure, content, and governance interact to jointly influence the effectiveness of an innovation network. Given that the influence of structure, content, and governance has been rarely examined jointly, our approach will be to develop, refine, and pilot-test a robust model of such joint influence in an appropriate innovation network. The empirical context for this stage of the study is Pratham, a Universal Primary Education network in India with an established track record as an innovator in the development and delivery of educational programs. The research effort will focus on three key data components: a detailed mapping of the network's 23 centers, with the goal of capturing the structure and content dimensions; a set of semi-structured interviews with network participants to identify the network governance; and a set of detailed analyses tracking how specific innovations have fared in each of the structure-content-governance configurations across the centers.