Paper Seminar: One Foot In, One Foot Out

The Paper Seminar series is a perfect opportunity to get up to speed with the entrepreneurship research scene and meet and greet your fellow researchers.

We follow the traditional approach with 30-45 minutes of presentation, followed by comments and discussion.

Paper Abstract

The innovation literature commonly assumes that access to diverse external sources of information should have a positive effect on a firm’s innovation performance. But it does not account for the fact that individuals have a fixed amount of time to devote to search. How do people dedicated to innovative search allocate their time between internal and external information sources? What effect does this have on innovation? With survey and patent data, we examined the search behaviors and innovation outcomes of the most senior engineers and technical experts from one of the most innovative global firms. By examining a select group of scientists and engineers tasked with innovation search, we show how individuals’ search approach affected the innovations produced. We found that an individuals’ breadth of external collaborators fostered innovation outcomes, but this depended upon how individuals’ allocated their attention between internal and external sources of information. Our research contributes a nested understanding of how individual search behavior affects a firm’s innovative outcomes and reveals two distinct but equifinal search approaches.

Biography

Linus Dahlander joined ESMT European School of Management and Technology in January 2011 as an assistant professor. From 2006 to 2008, Linus was an assistant professor and an Advanced Institute of Management Research Fellow with the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at Imperial College Business School in the UK. From 2008 to 2010, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he worked on the Mimir project that explores how networks shape ideas led by professors Dan McFarland, Woody Powell, Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning. Linus received his PhD in Technology Management and Economics from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden in 2006.

His research investigates how new ideas and innovations are developed in networks and communities. Linus is particularly interested in situations where problems are increasingly complex and a large number of individuals collaborate to advance a knowledge frontier. This research seeks to understand how these communities and networks unfold over time when individuals are distributed and autonomous – self-selecting tasks and collaboration partners.