Rotating Leadership and Collaborative Innovation
通过研究2001至2006年间全球计算与通信行业的八项技术合作,发现轮值领导过程比主导或共识领导更能促进跨组织创新,因为它能交替决策控制、引导技术搜索并动员多元参与者。
Using a multiple-case, inductive study of eight technology collaborations between ten organizations in the global computing and communications industries between 2001 and 2006 this paper examines why some interorganizational relationships produce technological innovations while others do not. Comparisons of more and less innovative collaborations show that high-performing collaborative innovation involves more than possessing the appropriate structural antecedents (e.g., R&D capabilities, social embeddedness) suggested by prior alliance studies. Rather, it also involves dynamic organizational processes associated with collaboration partners’ leadership roles that solve critical innovation problems related to recombination across boundaries. While dominating and consensus leadership processes are associated with less innovation, a rotating leadership process is associated with more innovation. It involves alternating decision control that accesses the complementary capabilities of both partner organizations, zig-zagging objectives that engender deep and broad technological search for potential innovations, and fluctuating network cascades that mobilize different participants who bring variable inputs to recombination. The paper also discusses recombination mechanisms in the organization of collaborative innovation, variations in the performance of dynamic interorganizational ties, and how organizations develop symbiotic relationships that overcome the tendency of long-lived relationships toward inertia.