Social capital and individual innovativeness in university research networks
Cristóbal Casanueva
University of Seville, Departamento de Administración de Empresas y Marketing, Seville, Spain
Ángeles Gallego
University of Seville, Departamento de Administración de Empresas y Marketing, Seville, Spain
PP: 105 - 117
Abstract
Many studies have examined the relations between individuals and organizations and their influence on innovativeness. Some have looked at networks that improve innovative activity at an organizational, departmental and individual level, using in the latter case the individual's egonet. This study explores the way in which an individual's social capital and each of its three dimensions affect innovativeness. Having assessed the entire network of a university department and calculated the social capital of its members, their innovativeness was compared on the basis of their scientific production. The results show that the positions of researchers in the network structure and network quality are less important than the resources that they are able to access through their relations.
Keywords
individual level, innovativeness, network structure, university research, resources, social capital
Article Text
Network analysis in the field of management has been growing for over a decade as a means of understanding the relations that arise within and between organizations, beyond any that may arise between a mere dyad or pair of actors (Nohria & Eccles 1992; Gulati 1999; Gulati, Nohria & Zaheer 2000). The study of networks and their methods of operating -Social Network Analysis (SNA)- has been employed in different fields of management, and many investigations have concentrated on gaining a better understanding of innovative results by studying relations between both individual and organizational actors (Ahuja 2000; Inkpen & Tsang 2005).
The study of business innovation within the firm has centred, above all, on the concept of intellectual capital and the learning capacity of organizations and their members (Cohen & Levinthal 1990; Kogut & Zander 1992; Quinn, Anderson & Finkelstein 1996). However, these approaches fail to scrutinize the influence that such relations may have on individual production.
The concept of social capital allows the value of the relations held by individuals or organizations to be associated with their results. The social capital of an actor arises from behavioural patterns in the relations that are maintained within the different types of exchange networks (economic, information, affect...) (Adler & Kwon 2002; Bourdieu 1986; Coleman 1988). SNA quantifies the social capital of an organization, a department or an individual and looks at its effect on innovation (Ahuja 2000; Bell 2005; Tsai & Ghoshal 1998; Rodan & Galunic 2004). However, an understanding of the way in which individual social capital, which arises from the relational network of a member of the organization, affects that person's innovative performance complicates the measurement of social capital and its dimensions and the assessment of individual results (Rodan & Galunic 2004).
Our objective is to provide evidence on the way in which the different facets of individual relations and their social capital affect innovativeness and innovative performance. Social capital is analysed as a set of dimensions extracted from an individual's position in the network, the quality of that individual's links with other colleagues and the individual's capacity to access valuable resources through those contacts. However, it is difficult to attribute innovative results (patents, new products, improved processes...) in an unequivocal way in the majority of contexts in which innovation is usually studied (laboratories, research centres, R&D departments in large firms...), as in these contexts innovations are the product of team work and do not generate a result that is attributable to any one individual. As a consequence, this work centres on an institution whose innovative function is essential throughout the world: the university. Its particularity is that the production of new knowledge is easily identified with the individual or group of individuals that generate it. McFadyen and Cannella (2005) consider that published research results represent documented new knowledge.
A social network analysis was therefore performed on the way in which the innovative performance of university researchers is affected by their position in the internal network of their departments, the quality of their contacts in that network, and the access to resources provided by those contacts.
The next section presents a review of the literature on social capital and innovation, after which the proposed model is presented, the methodology is explained, and the results from applying the data to a university network are set out. A critical discussion follows, in the final section, on the results and their implications.
SOCIAL CAPITAL AND INNOVATION
Social capital is currently used to explain different management phenomena. It is, moreover, a broad concept that has been defined in many varied ways (Adler & Kwon 2002). Problems, ideas and perspectives are found intertwined in these definitions, although a common standpoint may be found in the majority of them, in cases where social capital is defined from a resource-based view and grounded in social network theory (Gulati et al. 2000; Rodan & Galunic 2004). Thus, social capital may be defined in terms of the resources derived from the relational network that an individual or organization maintains over the course of time.
Various works have studied the way in which social capital influences the performance of the firm (Koka & Prescott 1992; Zaheer & Bell 2005) and of the people within it (Burt 1992; Podolny & Baron 1997). Among other improvements, they clearly highlight improvements in a firm's innovative performance that are attributable to the relations between the firm and the individuals within it.
Arguments vary over how social capital influences ... continues ...
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