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

在现代组织中，团队是创新的基石，然而我们对团队成员和他们的社会网络中流动的知识如何成功地实现创造性的想法、任务或程序知之甚少。关于创新前因的研究中出现这种差距的一种解释是，学者们经常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、同事和其他组成组织的联系人的交集。社交网络领域的最新发展为构建一个更全面的组织创新过程模型提供了理论和方法，包括在何种条件下应该使用信息和通信技术来在团队内外共享与任务相关的知识。特别是组织的一个特征，使我们对创新过程的理解变得复杂，那就是在空间和时间上分离的员工数量的增加。地域分散增加了协调成本，使通过远距离联系进行知识交流变得更加困难，但它也有可能使个人通过当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将明确地处理组织团队中地理分散的权衡（即协调和创新）。他的前提是，将社会网络理论与现有的团队和组织研究相结合，提供了一幅更完整的图景，说明通过地理分散的团队和网络共享知识如何促进创新。为了测试组织中所提出的分散创新模型，将在公司内部进行多年的实地研究，这些公司：(a)拥有明确定义的组合和分散团队样本，(b)维护包含团队成员背景信息的公司数据库，(c)管理调查以评估团队内部和外部的知识共享，以及(d)采用标准化的创新措施来评估团队的绩效质量。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和对比，该项目探索分散在多个机构的科学合作成功的预测因素。他之前的研究表明，当团队在地理上更加分散时，团队外部的知识共享与创新的联系更加紧密。在此基础上，本项目将从四个重要方面扩展当前的思维：(1)考察知识共享的方向，而不是假设知识在团队内外均等流动；(2)明确要学习的知识来源，特别是联系人所在的位置；(3)探索知识意识，看看团队成员知道其他人所知道的程度；(4)考虑知识共享的动态，以便在团队对外共享知识至关重要的时候学习。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不断增加，组织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为分散的创新过程建立能力，将使行业、学生和研究人员都受益。为了确保获得这项研究的实质内容，开发用于收集和分析团队和网络数据的在线工具将在课堂上使用，并与地理分布、知识共享和创新措施一起公开。

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.