Strategy for Inventors Placing Talent in Complex Innovation Networks
MIE Associate Professor Babak Heydari’s research on “Core or periphery: Examining where to allocate heterogeneous inventors and the impact on firms’ innovation” was published in the Strategic Management Journal.
Abstract:
We examine how firms should allocate their inventors to network locations to achieve their best innovation performance. We use an NK model to model the interactions between key factors that influence a firm’s innovation: (a) individuals’ embeddedness within the firm’s network, (b) individuals’ heterogeneity across their search distance as well as their adoption (i.e., imitation) propensity, and (c) the complexity of the firm’s landscape. We find that in high-complexity landscapes, firms benefit from allocating low-adopter agents to the core and high-adopters to the periphery, thereby promoting more independent search at the core. The opposite is true for low complexity landscapes. We further find that when agent types are unknown, individuals should be allocated based on their adoption propensity versus search distance.