MEASURING MAIL: NEW ANALYSES OF E-MAIL DATA FOR THE STUDY OF CROSS-DIVISIONAL INNOVATION.

Abstract

Most large firms fail to take advantage of the opportunity to create new businesses that combine resources from disparate parts of the firm. Although research on incentives and on formal organizational structure offer partial explanations for the difficulty of cross-divisional innovation, a deeper understanding of the problem requires research that simultaneously considers formal and informal structure. Unfortunately, such research faces two substantial methodological hurdles. First, the kind and quality of data that have typically been collected to conduct network analysis are inadequate; and second, there is a paucity of research that accounts for the embeddedness of the informal structure in the formal. In this paper, I begin to resolve these two issues. I argue for data collection methods relying on archives of intraorganizational e-mail data for network analysis. E-mail data are abundantly available ¿ though difficult for researchers to procure ¿ and represent substantially better measures of the social structure of the multi-divisional organization than alternative data sources. I also develop and pilot-test new measures that use e-mail data to quantify the relationships between formal divisions; in doing so, I explicitly link formal structure with informal structure. Together, these contributions of data collection and analysis promise to better equip future research to bridge the gap between formal structure and informal structure and, in doing so, to lay the groundwork for a fuller examination of the challenge of cross-divisional innovation from a network perspective.