The flow of ideas and timing of evaluation as determinants of knowledge creation

Sridhar Seshadri () and Zur Shapira

Industrial and Corporate Change, 2003, vol. 12, issue 5, 1099-1124

Abstract: There are different perspectives on the study of knowledge in organizations, developed in economics, sociology, anthropology and organization theory. Several authors followed Schumpeter's idea that innovations are new combinations of existing knowledge and incremental learning. Kogut and Zander further developed this idea and defined knowledge as a portfolio of options, and emphasized the importance of combinative capacities in knowledge creation. In a similar vein, Garud and Nayyar developed a notion of the transformative capacitiy of a firm in analyzing technological innovations. This paper follows in this tradition by pointing at the effects of different organizational structures on the flow of ideas and on the possibility of combining proposals in organizations. Communication structures, span of control and timing of evaluation are shown, using computer simulations, to have a large impact on the degree to which commonalities and complementarities among ideas and proposals can be detected and on the eventual combination of ideas for knowledge creation. Implications for organizational design are discussed. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:indcch:v:12:y:2003:i:5:p:1099-1124

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Industrial and Corporate Change is currently edited by Josef Chytry

More articles in Industrial and Corporate Change from Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().