Nexus Work: Brokerage on Creative Projects

Lingo, Elizabeth Long; O’Mahony, Siobhán

doi:10.2189/asqu.2010.55.1.47

Cited by 454 publications

(328 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…Overall, we found that the effective size of an affiliation increases with its awarded funds ( Fig. 2A), with the top-funded universities occupying brokerage positions between otherwise disconnected affiliations, potentially playing a key role in developing new access to information and opportunities (19,27,28).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 94%

Anatomy of funded research in science

Mondragón

Latora

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Seeking research funding is an essential part of academic life. Funded projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in the formulation of these partnerships? Here, by examining over 43,000 scientific projects funded over the past three decades by one of the major government research agencies in the world, we characterize how the funding landscape has changed and its impacts on the underlying collaboration networks across different scales. We observed rising inequality in the distribution of funding and that its effect was most noticeable at the institutional level-the leading universities diversified their collaborations and increasingly became the knowledge brokers in the collaboration network. Furthermore, it emerged that these leading universities formed a rich club (i.e., a cohesive core through their close ties) and this reliance among them seemed to be a determining factor for their research success, with the elites in the core overattracting resources but also rewarding in terms of both research breadth and depth. Our results reveal how collaboration networks organize in response to external driving forces, which can have major ramifications on future research strategy and government policy. , and tremendous effort has been put in place in maximizing research output, because assessment outcomes often have a direct financial impact on an institution's revenue (1). Bibliometrics are commonly used for this kind of performance evaluations (2-7), and the volume of grant income is also generally seen as a good indicator of performance. Although many studies have examined the collaboration patterns originating from publication information (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14), little is known about the characteristics of project collaborations supported by research funding, which is undoubtedly a type of research output in its own right, but also the origin of other research outputs.The volume of funding is often subject to direct and indirect constraints arising from internal research strategies and different levels of policy set out by the funding bodies and ultimately by the national government. This manifests into different emphases on both the research area and mode of collaboration, and potentially influences the way we form a project team. We have already seen examples of adaptive changes in our collaboration practices. For instance, research in the science and engineering sector is said to be increasingly interorganizational (15). In addition, there are different theories on the factors that may affect the establishment of a collaboration and how well a research team operates (13, 16). Elite universities were recognized as catalysts for facilitating largescale multipartner research collaborations (15), and multidisciplinary collaborations were found to have higher potential to foster research outcomes (17). As a result, the setup of a project consortium for a grant application might require considerable strategic planning, because who and...

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Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 94%

Anatomy of funded research in science

Mondragón

Latora

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Brokers are used on some creative projects to integrate diverse ideas and perspectives [54]. These brokers may exclude certain individuals from participating in order to avoid premature convergence, in effect maintaining diverse viewpoints by decreasing the frequency of interaction [54].…”

Section: Predicting Optimal Interaction Frequencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimizing Design Teams Based on Problem Properties: Computational Team Simulations and an Applied Empirical Test

McComb¹,

Kotovsky²,

Cagan³

2018

Preprint

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The performance of a team with the right characteristics can exceed the mere sum of the constituent members' individual efforts. However, a team having the wrong characteristics may perform more poorly than the sum of its individuals. Therefore, it is vital that teams are assembled and managed properly in order to maximize performance. This work examines how the properties of configuration design problems can be leveraged to select the best values for team characteristics (specifically team size and interaction frequency). A computational model of design teams that has been shown to effectively emulate human team behavior is employed to pinpoint optimized team characteristics for solving a variety of configuration design problems. McComb MD-16-1497 2These configuration design problems are characterized with respect to the local and global structure of the design space, the alignment between objectives, and the resources allotted for solving the problem. Regression analysis is then used to create equations for predicting optimized values for team characteristics based on problem properties. These equations achieve moderate to high accuracy, making it possible to design teams based on those problemproperties. Further analysis reveals hypotheses about how the problem properties can influence a team's search for solutions. This work also conducts a cognitive study on a different problem to test the predictive equations. For a configuration problem of moderate size, the model predicts that zero interaction between team members should lead to the best outcome. A cognitive study of human teams verifies this surprising prediction, offering partial validation of the predictive theory.

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“…Indeed, recent research on MNEs indicates that managers' boundary-spanning activities matter with regard to strategic renewal of business units Wooldridge et al 2008). Boundaryspanning ties are instrumental in linking multiple sources of diverse knowledge that may be useful to innovation (Hansen et al 2005;Lingo and O'Mahony 2009;Obstfeld 2005). Defined as activities through which new knowledge and expertise are sought from other units (Hansen 1999), boundary-spanning is a potential key driver of exploratory innovation.…”

Section: Boundary-spanning and Strategic Renewalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Achieving strategic renewal: the multi-level influences of top and middle managers’ boundary-spanning

Glaser

Fourné

Elfring³

2015

Small Bus Econ

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Drawing on corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and social network research, this study focuses on strategic renewal as a form of CE and examines the impact of boundary-spanning at top and middle management levels on business units' exploratory innovation. Analyses of multi-source and multi-level data, collected from 72 top managers (TMs) and 397 middle managers (MMs) operating in 34 units of a multinational organization, indicate that TMs' boundaryspanning is positively related to units' exploratory innovation, but also has a cascading effect on MMs by increasing their perceived role conflict. MMs' role conflict is negatively related to units' exploratory innovation and thus offsets some of the benefits gained through TMs' boundary-spanning activities. Taking a configurational perspective on social exchanges at multiple levels, we show that role conflict is reduced by overlapping boundary-spanning ties among TMs and MMs. Surprisingly, MMs' boundary-spanning does not relate to exploratory innovation. Our study shows that with regard to boundary-spanning, a top-down approach to CE as strategic renewal may be most effective because TMs play a key role in driving exploratory innovation. However, TMs need to be aware of the cascading social liabilities of their boundary-spanning behavior and ensure MMs develop similar networks. We advance ongoing debates in studies about CE and social networks by providing empirically validated insights into who drives strategic renewal and by uncovering the benefits and costs of social exchanges for strategic renewal. Furthermore, we uncover potential causes of mixed findings in network theory research and highlight a remedy to social liabilities.

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Nexus Work: Brokerage on Creative Projects

Cited by 454 publications

References 78 publications

Anatomy of funded research in science

Anatomy of funded research in science

Optimizing Design Teams Based on Problem Properties: Computational Team Simulations and an Applied Empirical Test

Achieving strategic renewal: the multi-level influences of top and middle managers’ boundary-spanning

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