Weak Ties are Stronger in Innovation Networks?

PhD. Burak Kuzucu

Istanbul University
Management Faculty

21/12/2010
Introduction
 The era of hyper-competition

 Innovation for sustainable competitiveness

 Days gone when innovation was a guarded secret

 No boundaries in the era of globalization

 Open (Cooperative) Innovation

Introduction
 Innovation networks can provide firms with access to
• information
• resources
• new markets
• technologies

• whatever they need

to integrate their
core competence
Introduction
 Growing interest in understanding the nature and
characteristics of innovation networks

 Collaboration impact on the degree of innovation

novelty have not analyzed yet

 Main Question:
“In innovation networks,
which type of (sectoral) linkages
is more efficient for
which type of innovation?”
Literature Review
 Innovation Network

 Linkages in Innovation Network

 Novelty of Innovation
Innovation Network
 Network is a set of nodes and relationships that connect
them

 Nodes can be anything

 In case of innovation networks;

 the nodes might be mainly considered as companies linked by
innovation-oriented relationships
Innovation Network
 Innovation: new combination of knowledge

 No single company with all resources of knowledge

required to innovate on its own

 Innovation-focused collaboration
• Different actors with the aim of accessing knowledge:
suppliers, competitors, universities and other knowledge-based
organizations

 Partnership takes on many forms with network actors

Innovation-focused Collaboration
Linkages in Innovation Network
 Different Ties in Network Theory:
Linkages in Innovation Network
 “The Strength of Weak Ties” – (Granovetter, 1973)

weak ties rather than strong ties are appropriate

for access to new information
Linkages in Innovation Network
 Strong Ties: Intra-sectoral linkages
• Partners in the same core technological field
• Strong ties broaden basic knowledge of relative mature products
and technologies

 Weak Ties: Inter-sectoral linkages

• Partners outside the core technological field in a different sub-
sector of the industry
• New ideas come from partners in different lines of business
• Companies from different networks are the source of different
knowledge bases
Novelty of Innovation
Hypothesis Development
 Assumption:
• Core competences are getting more differentiated in case firms’
sectors are differentiated

 Statements:
1. Intra-sectoral cooperation attempts to harness similar strengths
in improvement of existent products and processes

2. Inter-sectoral cooperation consists of actors from different

sectors with radically different knowledge bases
Hypothesis Development
 Example for intra-sectoral linkage
• WiMAX Forum: Innovation Network in Telecom sector
• Promoting and accelerating the introduction of cost-effective
broadband wireless access services into the marketplace
• Incremental Innovation

 Example for inter-sectoral linkage

• Quadruple Play: Innovation Network from different sectors such
as telecom, software and entertainment
• Disrupting the market by changing the existent technology
• Radical Innovation
Hypothesis Development
 To investigate the relationship between the different
type of linkages in innovation networks and the degree
of novelty of innovations:

 H.1: For radical innovation, inter-sectoral linkages (weak ties)

are more efficient in innovation networks than intra-sectoral
linkages (strong ties).

 H.2: For incremental innovation, intra-sectoral linkages (strong

ties) are more efficient in innovation networks than inter-
sectoral linkages (weak ties).
Q&A