Digital Science and Knowledge Boundaries in Complex Innovation

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dougherty, Deborah; Dunne, Danielle D.
• 署名单位: Rutgers University System; Rutgers University New Brunswick; Rutgers University Newark; Fordham University
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1110.0700
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 1467-1484
• 关键词: technology and innovation; organizational processes; organizing for innovation

摘要

Drug discovery is a complex innovation process in which scientists need to make sense of ambiguous findings and grapple with numerous unpredictable interdependencies over many years of product development. Digitalization has combined with expanding science to address this complexity, creating new ways to measure, analyze, and model chemical compounds, diseases, and human biology. We interviewed 85 scientists and managers working on drug discovery to understand how they deal with complexity. We find a major knowledge fault line between digital scientists, who use computers as laboratories and manipulate signs, and therapy scientists, who use conventional laboratories and manipulate physical material. We build on research on epistemic cultures and knowing in practice to develop empirically grounded theory for the role of digital science in complex innovation. We propose that digitalization creates a new form of knowledge that provides essential complementary insights for complex innovation that cannot exist otherwise. However, digitalization also creates new knowledge boundaries that concern central activities of innovation. These boundaries highlight challenges of complex innovation that digital sciences can help address, but only if the innovation activities are transformed so that digital and therapy sciences can integrate their complementary knowledge.