Network Dynamics

1. Your article looks at collaborations on patents and finds many organizational barriers and only a few enhancers.  You also noted that only some innovations were patented; others were published in academia or held by firms as propriety knowledge.

a. Could it be that the same organizational barriers that suppressed between-firm collaborations also facilitated within-firm innovation?  (Within-firm innovation seemed to be one of the dominant mechanisms in Boston.)

b. Are patents a better indicator of between-firm innovation than within-firm innovation?

2. Suppose you also had indicators of collaboration in publications and proprietary knowledge production.

a. How would you expect those collaboration networks to differ from your story about patents?

b. Would the organizational barriers and enhancers be similar or different?

c. Would Silicon Valley still have "gone first"?

3. How much is innovation a spatial phenomenon?

a. Did you find much evidence of long-distance collaborations?

b. Does collaboration usually only occur within a formal organizational setting?

4. Your article suggests that collaborations resulting in a patent are relatively brief, one-off exchanges and that collaboration not necessarily be repeated or the working relationship renewed over time.

a. As a social activity, how would you characterize innovation?

b. Do relationships among collaborators mean anything before or after the collaboration?

c. Given this characterization, how important is the size of a component?  What does component size indicate?

d. Do you believe that the collaboration relationships (which in and of themselves are one-off collaborations) are conduits for future exchange of knowledge?

e. Does anything actually "flow" through these networks over time, or are they literally representations of one-off collaborations?

5. Your article notes a tension between the eagerness of engineers in both environments to share ideas and facilitate creativity, and the many organizational mechanisms that hamper aggregregation.  Given this tension, how would you characterize the viscosity of knowledge flow through these networks?

6. The difference you note between individual attributes and institutional interests suggests an anti-reductionist view of social structure.

a. Structurally, do you think these institutional interests could be reduced to the individual roles of engineers versus corporate executives?

b. Are there structurally irreducible forces that constrain the networks you describe?

7. You discuss in wonderful detail the institutional forces that constrained the individual collaborations displayed in your networks, however these organizations and forces are actually invisible in the networks themselves.  How might we simultaneously visualize these individual and firm/market level forces?

8. Your article begins with a review of the earlier literature on networks and innovation, which you critiqued as static.  Yet after reading your paper, I am still left with some questions about the causal importance of the dynamics you discovered.

a. Did Silicon Valley go first because strong aggregating mechanisms were in greater abundance or because non-aggregating factors were less prohibitive?

b. Which of these factors, the presence of enhancers or the absence of inhibitors, is a stronger causal mechanism of collaboration?

c. Was the IBM fellowship and local graduate employment simply a fluke, a result of lower levels of the non-aggregation factors, or was there simply something in the water in Silicon Valley that made these more probable here than in Boston?

d. If these factors are causal, is the environment they fostered replicable?

e. Imagine a region hired you to replicate the innovation of Silicon Valley.  What would you advise?  Would you simply recommend pairing a corporate postdoc program with a good engineering university?  Or would a region be better advised to stabilize and reward big firms, discourage start-ups, suppress churn in internal labor markets, and promote internal collaboration?

1. Your paper tests four attachment mechanisms: 1) accumulative advantage ("rich get richer"); 2) homophily; 3) following the trend; 4) multiconnectivity (prefer diversity, seek out novelty).  How is following the trend different or distinguishable from accumulative advantage?  They seem like two ends of the same mechanism: following the trend from the perspective of the newcomer, accumulative advantage from the perspective of the early-comer.

2. Since your 2005 paper came out, Matt Jackson has since developed hybrid models of random-strategic network formation, the intuition being that an initial exposure or meeting may be random (the opportunity to create a tie) but that the decision whether to act on that opportunity is strategic.  Potentially, we could program each organization's strategic utility function to correspond to any of your four hypotheses.

a. How applicable would such a model be to this case?

b. How random are initial meetings, initial opportunities to form ties?

c. How strategic are the decisions to act on these opportunities?

3. Your paper leads off with analogies of dancing in a club and a formal waltz.  Both dance settings could also be viewed as fields in that they involve a variety of people as actors, dynamics, and logics which change and evolve over the course of an evening.  Your paper, however, focuses on organizations as actors.

a. Were you to apply the concept of fields to a context where people are actors, what would you change and what would stay the same?

b. Would you propose the same attachment mechanisms?

c. Do you see the concept of field analysis as portable across any kind of social domain?

d. Are there areas (or types of actors) where fields are more appropriate or less appropriate?

e. Is the study of field dynamics independent of these kinds of considerations?

4. What is the difference between field analysis and systems analysis?

a. Are there different cognitive or functional assumptions about the two?

5. Mike Hannan says he used to worry about micro-level foundations, but he doesn't any more.  He is happy when his explanations hold up independent of micro-level assumptions.

a. Does field analysis free us from having to make assumptions about micro-level foundations?

b. The micro-level motivations for each of the attachment mechanisms tested in this paper could be manifold. Do you favor a particular flavor of micro-foundations, or do you share Mike's ambivalence about micro-macro links?

6. Like Lee's paper, your paper focuses on collaborations as ties.  Lee's paper found a great number of barriers to collaboration.

a. What other kinds of ties are relevant to this field?

b. Might the interaction between positive or negative economic, political, and social ties influence collaborative ties?

c. If you were able to incorporate a second type of tie, in addition to collaborations, what would you have liked to add to the model?

d. How can we visualize organizational and institutional control mechanisms in a way that unbiases our purely positive collaboration structures?

e. I wonder if we might also represent barriers to collaboration as a type of tie, perhaps a negatively weighted collaborative tie. This could allow us to distinguish between collaborations that are absent because of a lack of visibility, collaborations that are absent because of a lack of relevance, and potential collaborations that could occur but do not because of barriers.  I'm not sure how we might collect data on that, but are there other ways to imagine how we might represent the "negative structure", to visualize the "invisible barriers", which affect structure equally, if not more, than constructive collaborative ties.