EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

TIE BREADTH, TIE STRENGTH AND THE LOCATION OF TIES: THE VALUE OF TIES INSIDE AN EMERGING MNC TO TEAM INNOVATION

Keeran Kowlaser () and Helena Barnard ()
Additional contact information
Keeran Kowlaser: Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria, Johannesburg, South Africa
Helena Barnard: Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria, Johannesburg, South Africa

International Journal of Innovation Management (ijim), 2016, vol. 20, issue 01, 1-31

Abstract: People differ in terms of the number and strength of ties that they cultivate. Previous literature has tended to focus on either strong ties or many weak ties with a largely unstated assumption that some degree of trade-off exists between the two (underlying trust and novel knowledge, respectively) and their relative contribution to innovation. Within the context of R&D in a SA MNC, this research provided evidence that tie breadth and tie strength are complementary in team innovation. The previously-documented tension between novelty and trust however remains present and becomes evident in the location of ties. Both strong and weak ties contribute most to innovation if they are neither too close (i.e., own team) nor too distant (i.e., outside the MNC). Instead, ties inside the greater R&D unit contributed most to innovation. This role of the location of ties suggests that studies of networks cannot remain limited to tie breadth and strength but has to be rooted in the specific context. This is consistent with prior evidence of innovation within mature and process-driven industries where an in-depth understanding of organisation knowledge is required rather than that of novel technologies. This largely inward orientation has important implications for the competitiveness of emerging MNCs.

Keywords: Team innovation; tie strength; tie breadth; novel knowledge; trust; multinational corporation; emerging markets; social network; R&D; absorptive capacity; fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S1363919616500067
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:wsi:ijimxx:v:20:y:2016:i:01:n:s1363919616500067

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S1363919616500067

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Innovation Management (ijim) is currently edited by Joe Tidd

More articles in International Journal of Innovation Management (ijim) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:wsi:ijimxx:v:20:y:2016:i:01:n:s1363919616500067