Social Influence and Human Interaction with Technology

Abstract

This chapter discusses how information that supports innovation flows throughout an organization, the construction and effects of team composition, the innovative processes that teams employ, and the development, implementation, and evaluation of systems used to manage the flow and distribution of information. As Allen and Cohen (1969) point out, effective communicators rise in their organizations as a result of their willingness to engage information—by reading and conversing outside of their immediate settings, but as Tushman (1977) explains, that kind of outreach precipitates special boundary roles, which come about to satisfy an organization’s communication network’s role of bridging an internal information network to external sources of information. Thompson (1965) investigates the conditions necessary to move an organization from a single-minded focus on productivity to one of those that facilitate innovation. At times, that means engaging rival firms, and von Hippel (1987) demonstrates that information sharing is economically beneficial to the organizations doing the trading. Freeman’s (1991) finding that information regarding innovative processes entails the development of effective information networks confirms how important it is for successful innovation that there exist effective external and internal communication networks, and that individuals collaborate to share information. von Hippel (1994) returns later in the chapter to qualify this point by showing that there is a direct correlation between the level of stickiness and the expense related to moving that information to a location where it can be applied to solving a problem.