CKN Research - Research Description

Our research project seeks to better understand the formation, development and performance of self-organizing virtual innovation networks as well as key roles in those networks. It involves analyzing the communication structure by interviews and by mining the email archives and mailing lists of firms and public domain e-mail archives. This approach allows us to trace patterns of interaction within commercial enterprises and public groups to gain a better understanding of communication practices and their impact on the performance of virtual innovation networks. Our method to study virtual innovation networks consists of

• Developing software tools focusing on the collection, measurement, analysis, and visualization of the temporal evolution of virtual innovation networks,
• automatically mining the mailing lists of firms and public domain mailing lists and e-mail archives
• undertaking qualitative interviews with senior management in those firms and groups to develop metrics to assess the relative performance of virtual innovation networks.

Our research advances management knowledge by examining virtual innovation networks of a unique mix of small, medium, and large corporations across different industries and geographies. In addition, this data set and the newly developed analytic tools provide our team with an opportunity to examine a large number of innovation networks over a sustained period of time. This will allow for cross-group comparisons of social structure and communication practices and correlation of those against performance, across a much larger sample of virtual networks than have been examined in prior studies.