Dynamics of collaboration network community and exploratory innovation: the moderation of knowledge networks

Abstract

Previous studies have explored the effects of network structures on organization’s exploratory innovation from different perspectives. However, few studies focus on the network community, and there still exists a possible tension on the relationship between network community and organization’s exploratory innovation. In an attempt to make theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature, this study addresses the above research gap by focusing on the dynamics of the network community, and developed a research model that explains how the dynamics of network community affect organization’s exploratory innovation. Furthermore, organizations are not only embedded in the collaboration network, but also in the knowledge network, and we further proposed that the configuration of organizational knowledge network has a moderating effect on the above relationships. We mainly focused on the network cohesion of organizational knowledge network and divided it into global cohesion and local cohesion. With the patent data of smartphone collaboration network from year 2004 to 2017, we empirically examined our hypotheses. The estimation results verified the inverted-U-shaped relationship between dynamics of network community and organization’s exploratory innovation. Furthermore, global cohesion of focal organization’s knowledge network moderates the process in the way that when it is at high level, organization’s exploratory innovation can benefit more from a moderate level of dynamics of network community. Nevertheless, local cohesion moderates the process in the way that when it is at low level, organization’s exploratory innovation can benefit more from a moderate level of dynamics of network community.