Strategic networking: how highly skilled professionals can best use their networks to drive innovation

A better understanding of the purpose and sequence network connections is critical to help individuals and organizations deliver the next generation of innovations. Focusing on highly skilled professionals who work on creative tasks, the study seeks to understand differences in how individuals use their professional networks and examines which network strategies are most effective to develop innovations. As such, this study aims to bring to the surface the unwritten ‘user manual’ of networks, examining how this manual may be different for diverse sets of individuals and diverse types of innovation. To achieve these goals, the project involves collaboration with several corporate partners and uses a novel toolkit of methods including an online network monitoring tool to obtain longitudinal, contextualized network data.
The collection consisted therefore of interview and survey data from corporate research data. However, this project's primary data is not deposited due to confidentiality issues. <p>People’s professional networks have been shown to influence creativity, innovation and career success. Existing research at the interface of networks and innovation has shown that certain network configurations are associated with innovative outcomes, but overlooks two fundamental properties of networks.

First, most studies map an individual’s network without much reference to when individuals use certain contacts and what for. Second, no work has addressed how individuals might differ in terms of the sequence in which they ‘activate’ network connections.

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