Efficient Structures for Innovative Social Networks

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lovejoy, William S.; Sinha, Amitabh
• 署名单位: University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1100.1168
• 发表日期: 2010
• 页码: 1127-1145
• 关键词: innovation; ideation; social networks

摘要

What lines of communication among members of an organization are most productive in the early, ideation phase of innovation? We investigate this question with a recombination and selection model of knowledge transfer operating through a social network. We find that ideation is accelerated when people in the organization dynamically churn through a large (ideally the entire population) set of conversational partners over time, which naturally begets short path lengths and eliminates information bottlenecks. Group meetings, in which the content of conversations is available to all for consideration, are another way to learn in parallel and accelerate the ideation process, although for complex problems they may not offer significant advantages over the best decentralized networks. The idealized core-periphery graphs emerge as an important family on the time-cost efficient frontier. New sociometrics for the analyses of innovation processes emerge from this investigation.