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

团队是现代组织中创新的基石，但我们对通过团队成员及其社交网络流动的知识如何成功实施创造性的想法、任务或程序知之甚少。造成这种差距的一个原因是，学者们往往关注团队层面的分析或组织层面的分析，而不是团队及其经理、同事和其他组织联系人之间的交集。社交网络领域的最新发展为在组织中建立更全面的创新过程模式提供了理论和方法，包括在哪些条件下应使用信息和通信技术在团队内外分享与任务相关的知识。尤其是，组织的一个特征使我们对创新过程的理解变得复杂起来，那就是空间和时间上分散的员工数量的增加。地理分散增加了协调成本，这使得通过遥远的纽带S进行知识交流变得更加困难，但它也有可能使个人通过本地联系接触到独特的知识来源，从而创造创新机会。在这个项目中，PI将明确解决组织团队中地理分散的权衡(即协调和创新)。他的前提是，将社交网络理论与对团队和组织的现有研究相结合，可以更全面地了解通过分散在不同地理位置的团队和网络进行知识共享如何促进创新。为了在组织中测试拟议的分散创新模式，将在以下公司内进行多年实地研究：(A)对配置和分散的团队进行明确定义的样本；(B)维护关于团队成员背景信息的公司数据库；(C)进行调查以评估团队内外的知识共享；以及(D)采用标准化的创新衡量标准，以便能够评估团队的业绩质量。在最后一年，PI将把这些实地研究的结果与另一个纵向项目的结果进行比较，该项目探索分散在多个机构的科学合作成功的预测因素。他之前的工作表明，当团队在地理上更加分散时，团队外的知识共享与创新更紧密地联系在一起，在此基础上，该项目将通过以下四个重要方式扩展当前的思维：(1)检查知识共享的方向，而不是假设知识在团队内和团队外平等流动；(2)确定要学习的知识来源，明确联系人所在的位置；(3)探索知识的意识，以了解团队成员了解他人所知的程度。以及(4)考虑知识共享的动态，以了解团队何时需要在外部共享知识。更广泛的影响：随着美国和其他国家对知识密集型工作的需求增加，组织中的创新将继续成为全球经济增长的关键组成部分。了解组织如何通过团队和网络构建分散创新流程的能力将使行业、学生和研究人员受益。为了确保获得这项研究的实质内容，为收集和分析团队和网络数据而开发的在线工具将在课堂上使用，并与地理分散、知识共享和创新的衡量标准一起公开提供。

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.