To sustain increased levels of innovation, scholars have suggested that firms need to move the focus outside their boundaries, and cast their net wide for knowledge that can facilitate the process of innovation. Since Cohen and Levinthal (1990)’s seminal study on absorptive capacities, the creation and development of innovations has been viewed as an inter-organizational process where firms produce new knowledge but can also absorb part of it from outside (Powell, Koput, Smith-Doherr, 1996). In several contexts - most of all in science-based and high tech ones - it is today economically feasible to operate a division of innovative labour among entities which are institutionally different and are driven by a separate system of incentives (Arora, Fosfuri, Gambardella, 2001). With this regard, Information and Communications Technologies (in particular, the Internet) have greatly enhanced the ability of firms to expand their repertoire of knowledge by engaging external actors in the innovation process. The Internet in fact enables the creation of virtual environments – platforms for collaboration that allow firms to tap into customer knowledge through an ongoing dialogue (Nambisan, 2002; Sawhney & Prandelli, 2000). To fully leverage the power of virtual environments, the authors propose that firms need to combine direct channels of connection with mediated channels created by virtual brokers. These actors create their own virtual environments for knowledge transfer and provide this knowledge as a service to firms. With an in-depth grounded study of several operators the authors identify different archetypes of virtual brokers of knowledge finalized to distributed innovation.
Knowledge Management and the Emerging Organizational Models of Distributed Innovation: Towards a Taxonomy
PRANDELLI, EMANUELA;VERONA, GIANMARIO
2005
Abstract
To sustain increased levels of innovation, scholars have suggested that firms need to move the focus outside their boundaries, and cast their net wide for knowledge that can facilitate the process of innovation. Since Cohen and Levinthal (1990)’s seminal study on absorptive capacities, the creation and development of innovations has been viewed as an inter-organizational process where firms produce new knowledge but can also absorb part of it from outside (Powell, Koput, Smith-Doherr, 1996). In several contexts - most of all in science-based and high tech ones - it is today economically feasible to operate a division of innovative labour among entities which are institutionally different and are driven by a separate system of incentives (Arora, Fosfuri, Gambardella, 2001). With this regard, Information and Communications Technologies (in particular, the Internet) have greatly enhanced the ability of firms to expand their repertoire of knowledge by engaging external actors in the innovation process. The Internet in fact enables the creation of virtual environments – platforms for collaboration that allow firms to tap into customer knowledge through an ongoing dialogue (Nambisan, 2002; Sawhney & Prandelli, 2000). To fully leverage the power of virtual environments, the authors propose that firms need to combine direct channels of connection with mediated channels created by virtual brokers. These actors create their own virtual environments for knowledge transfer and provide this knowledge as a service to firms. With an in-depth grounded study of several operators the authors identify different archetypes of virtual brokers of knowledge finalized to distributed innovation.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.