Sharing Innovation Across Government Organizations

分享有关有价值的创新的知识是一个组织有效运作的基本前提。美国的公共部门对知识共享提出了一些特殊的挑战，因为政府的联邦性质以及我们这个大国在地理上分散职能的趋势。有时，人们希望各种信息和通信技术（ICT）可以使地理变得几乎无关紧要，使与全国各地的人沟通变得像与隔壁一样容易。当然，技术只是创造了可能的外部界限。仅仅因为沟通是廉价的并不意味着它发生了。有许多社会、制度、个人和情境因素限制了任何沟通方式的使用（尽管通常是不同的）。个人可能不愿意通过提问来暴露自己的无知；出于竞争的考虑，组织可能不鼓励信息共享；或者社区层面的自给自足规范可能会阻碍提问。有必要了解特定的沟通方式如何与人们如何利用不同的知识来源相互作用，为什么他们以他们的方式提问和回答问题，以及技术在何处以及如何有助于改善知识共享，特别是关于有效创新的知识。本研究主要关注两个基本问题：第一，个体在寻找信息时采用何种搜索策略；是什么决定了它们的搜索顺序？其次，是什么促使一些个人分享他们的知识，而社区的其他成员几乎不参与交流，免费利用他人提供的信息？研究小组将在参与犯罪现场样本分析的DNA实验室探讨这些问题。这是一个特别创新密集、定义明确但地理上分散的社区。这项工作的知识密集性质与参与者的可管理、封闭的宇宙相结合，使这个社区成为研究地理分散的社区中信息技术对知识共享影响的理想实验室。

The sharing of knowledge about valuable innovations is a fundamental prerequisite to the effective operation of an organization. The public sector in the US offers some special challenges to the sharing of knowledge because of the federal nature of the government and because of tendencies for functions to be distributed geographically across our large country.It is sometimes hoped that various information and communication technologies (ICT) could make geography nearly irrelevant, making it as easy to communicate with someone across the country as next door. Of course, technology merely creates the outer bounds of what is possible. Simply because communication is cheap does not mean that it occurs. There are numerous societal, institutional, individual, and situational factors that limit the use of any modalities of communication (although often differentially). Individuals may be reluctant to reveal their ignorance through their questions; organizations may discourage sharing of information because of competitive concerns; or community-level norms of self-sufficiency may discourage asking questions. There is a need to understand how the particular modality of communication interplays with how people tap into different sources of knowledge, why they ask and answer questions the way they do, and where and how technology is helpful in improving knowledge sharing, paticularly knowledge about effective innovations. This study focuses on two fundamental questions: First, what search strategies do individuals adopt when looking for information; what determines the sequence of their search? Second, what motivates some individuals to share their knowledge, while other members of the community barely participate in an exchange, free riding on the information provided by others? The research team will explore these issues in DNA labs involved in the analysis of crime scene samples. This is a particularly innovation-intensive and a well-defined but geographically dispersed community. The knowledge-intensive nature of this work combined with the manageable, closed universe of participants, make this community an ideal laboratory for the study of impact of information technology on Knowledge sharing in a geographically dispersed community.