Conaldi, Guido ORCID: 0000-0003-3552-7307 and Lomi, Alessandro (2009) The network structure of product innovation: a case study on software development. In: 25th EGOS Colloquium, 2-4 Jul 2009, Barcelona, Spain. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Innovation is crucial for competitive advantage of organizations and innovation models that hinge on communities of practices (CoPs) in order to coordinate distributed knowledge attract the attention of increasing numbers of managers. However, the new managerial challenges posed by these strategies and the heterogeneous results obtained by CoPs facing innovation challenges call for a deeper understanding of the social mechanisms that sustain the innovativeness of these communities. We contribute to fill this research gap with a case study that investigates the structure of the knowledge network connecting members of a CoP and searches recognizable patterns of interaction adopted by the CoP when pursuing innovation. Our case study is a Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) project representing a CoP whose members’ interactions are mostly computer-mediated. Our findings show that a distinguishable structural pattern of interaction is associated with episodes of product innovation. Specifically, the presence of a single dense core of knowledge exchanges involving all the members of the CoP who actually implement innovation appears to be a requirement for the innovation efforts to succeed.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Paper)
Additional Information:	[1] This paper was presented at the 25th EGOS (European Group for Organizational Studies) Colloquium held from 2-4 July 2009 at the ESADE Business School, Barcelona, Spain.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	community of practice, routine, innovation, knowledge management, FLOSS Open Source Software, structural cohesion, social network analysis
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Business > Networks and Urban Systems Centre (NUSC) > Centre for Business Network Analysis (CBNA)
Related URLs:	Organisation Organisation
Last Modified:	04 Mar 2019 16:48
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/5333

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