Career: Fostering Innovation in Organizations Through Geographically Dispersed Teams and Networks

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Teams are the building blocks of innovation in modern organizations, yet we know little about how the knowledge that flows through team members and their social networks results in the successful implementation of creative ideas, tasks, or procedures. One explanation for this gap in research about the antecedents of innovation is that scholars have often focused on either the team level of analysis or the organizational level of analysis, not on the intersection of teams and their managers, colleagues, and other contacts who make up the organization. Recent developments in the field of social networks offer both theory and methods for building a more comprehensive model of the innovation process in organizations, including conditions under which information and communication technologies should be used for sharing task-relevant knowledge within and outside of the team. One feature of organizations, in particular, that has complicated our understanding of the innovation process is a rise in the number of spatially and temporally separated employees. Geographic dispersion increases coordination costs by making the exchange of knowledge through distant tie s more difficult, however it also has the potential to expose individuals to unique sources of knowledge through local ties, thus creating opportunities for innovation. In this project, the PI will explicitly address the tradeoffs of geographic dispersion in organizational teams (i.e., coordination and innovation). His premise is that integrating social network theory with existing research on teams and organizations provides a more complete picture of how knowledge sharing through geographically dispersed teams and networks can foster innovation. In order to test the proposed model of dispersed innovation in organizations, multi-year field studies will be conducted within firms that: (a) have a clearly defined sample of collocated and dispersed teams, (b) maintain a corporate database with background information on team members, (c) administer surveys to assess knowledge sharing within and outside of teams, and (d) employ a standardized measure of innovation to permit evaluation of performance quality across teams. In the final year, the PI will compare and contrast results from these field studies with findings from another longitudinal project that explores predictors of success for scientific collaborations dispersed across multiple institutions. Building on the his prior work, which showed that knowledge sharing outside of teams was more strongly associated with innovation when teams were more geographically dispersed, this project will extend current thinking in four important ways by: (1) examining the direction of knowledge sharing instead of assuming knowledge flows equally in and out of teams, (2) identifying the sources of knowledge to learn specifically where contacts are located, (3) probing the awareness of knowledge to see the extent to which team members know what others know, and (4) considering the dynamics of knowledge sharing to learn when it is critical for teams to share knowledge externally. Broader Impacts: As demand mounts for knowledge-intensive work in the US and other countries, innovation in organizations will continue to be a key component of global economic growth. Understanding how organizations can build capabilities for a dispersed innovation process through teams and networks will benefit industry, students, and researchers alike. To ensure access to the substance of this research, online tools developed to collect and analyze the team and network data will be used in the classroom and made publicly available along with measures of geographic dispersion, knowledge sharing, and innovation.