Brokerage that works: Balanced triads and the brokerage roles that matter for innovation.

Abstract

A key premise in innovation literature suggests that individuals enabling contact between pairs of otherwise disconnected others (i.e., holding open triads) are more innovative, as they benefit from more opportunities for knowledge recombination. Such benefits also come with a cost, as conducting innovative action from open triads requires finding common ground to coordinate and integrate disparate knowledge and efforts from unconnected others. However, it is yet unclear which specific open triadic structures offer the greatest net value to facilitate individual innovativeness. We contribute to this debate by going beyond a homogeneous conceptualization of open triads, examining the relation between different brokerage roles and individual innovativeness. We theorize that some roles are more balanced than others in terms of access to knowledge novelty and integration costs. Specifically, we find that balanced open triads (gatekeepers and itinerant roles) are crucial to facilitate individual innovativeness, as compared to unbalanced open triads (coordinator and liaison roles). We also propose that brokers obtain the greatest innovation benefits from balanced open triads when they are embedded in institutional settings that are distant from knowledge applicability. We test our ideas through a large-scale study of 1,010 biomedical scientists.

Publication
Journal of Product Innovation Management

Highlights

  1. This paper confirms that intermediating between otherwise disconnected individuals facilitates innovation. It also shows that not all intermediation positions are equal, since each open triad brings a unique combination of benefits and costs to the focal individual.
  2. Individuals seeking to build up a collaborative network for innovation must pay attention to the composition of the triads they form: neither too homogeneous nor too diverse triads in terms of professional diversity help to come up with innovative solutions.
  3. Our findings also show that, in settings that are more distant from the application context, holding balanced open triads is particularly crucial to overcome institutional rigidities that deter innovation activity.