How Internet technologies impact information flows in R&D: reconsidering the technological gatekeeper (original) (raw)

From wires to partners: How the internet has fostered R & D collaborations within firms

Management Science, 2012

How did the diffusion of the Internet influence research collaborations within firms? We examine the relationship between business use of basic Internet technology and the size and geographic composition of industrial research teams between 1992 and 1998. We find robust empirical evidence that basic Internet adoption is associated with an increased likelihood of collaborative patents from geographically dispersed teams. On the contrary, we find no evidence of such a link between Internet adoption and within-location collaborative patents, nor do we find any evidence of a relationship between basic Internet and singleinventor patents. We interpret these results as evidence that adoption of basic Internet significantly reduced the coordination costs of research teams, but find little evidence that a drop in the costs of shared resource access significantly improved research productivity.

The Role of Managers in R&D Organizational Networks. Are They Knowledge Workers or Bureaucrats

The Asian Journal of Technology Management (AJTM, 2022

In today's competition-driven world, competitive advantage is the only way for an organization to survive. There are various ways to gain a competitive edge through the application of knowledge, technology, and science. Indonesian public research and development (R&D) faces numerous challenges, one of which is researchers' low productivity in terms of international journal publications. To boost research productivity and performance, efforts must be made to streamline knowledge flows within public R&D institutions. Additionally, data from dynamic information flows in networks can be used to evaluate bureaucratic effectiveness and identify potential knowledge talents or actors within R&D organizations. The purpose of this study is to determine the role of managers at all levels in a public R&D organization in coordinating information flow through knowledge networks and bureaucratic relationships. The social network analysis (SNA) technique was used to map managers' role in aligning knowledge flows in an Indonesian public R&D organization. Individuals were classified according to their type and centrality in the network, and network metrics such as "degree of centrality," "eigenvector centrality," and "clustering coefficient" were determined. It was found that the organization has some issues with knowledge flows and power distribution. The two distinct knowledge flow patterns, one for knowledge-seeking and the other for administrative knowledge, do not appear to be synchronized. The director of the R&D center is assumed to be less influential than the top manager in terms of knowledge and bureaucratic influence. At the managerial level, clique tendency is lower, while it is higher at the nonmanagerial level. Such centralization and cliques are dangerous because managing knowledge cannot be handled by a single person in a knowledge-intensive organization such as an R&D institution. Additionally, it was discovered that middle managers are critical for knowledge-seeking purposes, whereas administrative managers dominate the bureaucratic role. The research implications are dependent on deciphering the complexities of knowledge flows among employees and the variables that influence the knowledge-transfer process within an organization. This issue will exacerbate the problem by decreasing productivity and increasing reliance on a small number of people. Additional research is required to generalize the findings to other Indonesian R&D institutions.

Social capital in distributed system development: A case of grid development in particle physics

2009

No organisation, no matter how large, can remain totally reliant on the stocks of new knowledge it generates itself. In order to keep abreast of the latest scientific and technological developments, R&D organisations must continuously import knowledge from beyond the organisations boundaries. How does this external knowledge which is critical to success then become absorbed and integrated into the firm? Our paper addresses this question through the lens of the influential technological gatekeeper theory. Drawing on social network analysis (SNA) and interview evidence from a medical devices R&D group, we find that the gatekeeper role is still vital, but no longer needs to be performed by a single individual. Instead, the modern R&D group can keep abreast of the latest technological advances through a combination of Web-enabled internal and external communication specialists. A unique contribution this paper makes to the IT-enable social network literature is the development of an updated conceptual framework of how the gatekeeper role is performed in the modern R&D group.

The influence of gatekeepers on project performance in a major R&D facility

1980

Oral communciatiori networks represent an important medium through which information and new ideas are constantly transmitted both within and across organizational boundaries (Boor.nan, 1975; Allen, 1977). The research reported here focuses explicitly on the effectiveness of the gatekeeping function within the actual communication networks of a major R&D facility. Gatekeepers are those key individual technologists who are both strongly connected to internal colleagues and strongly 2 connected to sources of external technology. More specifically, we will investigate the relationships between the existence of gatekeepers and project performance for different kinds of tasks and technical activities. Such comparative results should increase our understanding of the role played by gatekeepers in the effective transfer and utilization of external technology and information. Gatekeepers and Technology Transfer Organizational systems must be able to collect and process infonnation from outside sources in order to keep informed about relevant external developments and technological innovations (Myers and Marquis, 1969; Utterback, 1974). One way of dealing with the growing demands of information processing is through specializationcertain specialized individuals or groups evolving to keep abreast of relatively homogenous segments of the system's technological and work environments (Katz and Kahn , 1966; Thompson, 1967). Such differentiation, in turn, is associated with the development of more locally defined languages and fifteen weeks, the overc'll response rate was 93 percent. Moreover, 68 percent of all the coiim jnications reported within the laboratory were mentioned by both parties (see Weiss and Jacobson, 1969, for canparative data). Communications outside the facility, however, could not be corroborated with discission partners. Project communication is a measure of the average amount of technical communication per person per project over the fifteen weeks. As discussed in Katz and Tushman (1979), six mutually exclusive communication measures were operationalized for each project as follows: (1) communication within the Project ; (2) communication within the project' s Deparment (but not including project members); (3) communication to other Laboratory departments; (4) communication to other Organizational divisions (including marketing and manufacturing); (5) communication to external Professionals outside the organization (including consulting firms, universities, and professional societies); and (6) communication to external Operational areas (including suppliers, vendors, and customers). External or extra-organizational communication is the sum of the reported communication to professional and operational areas. Individual responses were pooled to obtain measures of project communication with each of these various areas. Although the literature has used a number of slightly different criteria to empirically define gatekeepers (Allen, 1970; Whitley and Frost, 1973), conceptually, they are defined as those internal stars (i.e., high internal communicators) who also maintain a high degree of external communication. This study operationalized gatekeepers as those individuals who were in the top fifth of their intra-department communication distribution and who were also in the top fifth of the

Web-enabled boundary spanners and their role in the knowledge flow network

2009

R&D networking in a pharmaceutical company: some implications for human resource management

R&D Management, 1995

A case-study of the R&D networking activities of Glaxo Group Research was carried out between June and November 1993. Different types of networking situation were identified using a simple 2x2 matrixthe 'networking uncertainty map'. This paper describes the background to Glaxo's R&D networking activities, introduces and illustrates the uncertainty map and then suggests the implications of each type of network. There are implications in general for R & 0 management and more specifically for the management of human resources in R&D. Managers might easily apply the uncertainty map to their own R&D networking Situations.

Being a Catalyst of Innovation: the role of knowledge diversity and network closure

Organization Science

Whereas recent research on organizational innovation suggests that there is an ecology of roles supporting the innovative process, the majority of network research has concentrated on the role of inventors. In this paper, we contribute to research on organizational innovation by studying the social structural conditions conducive to individuals supporting, facilitating and promoting the innovativeness of their colleagues – a role we refer to as catalysts of innovation. We consider an individual’s network position and the type of knowledge available to them through their network as key enabling conditions. We argue that the unique configuration of having access to diverse knowledge through a closed network enables individuals to act as innovation catalysts. Based on a study of 276 researchers in the R&D division of a large multinational high-tech company we find strong support for our prediction and demonstrate that catalysts make important contributions to the innovative outputs of other researchers in terms of their colleagues’ patent applications.

How Internet technologies impact information flows in R&D: reconsidering the technological gatekeeper (original) (raw)

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