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.

Research versus development, external knowledge, and firm innovation

“…The PITEC survey is also characterized by very high response rates, varying between 92% and 96% (FECYT, 2016), thus allowing for a nearly exhaustive representation of the innovation activities of the private sector in Spain. Due to such comprehensive and fine‐grained information on R&D and innovation activities at the firm level, the survey's Spanish microdata have been frequently used in various innovation studies (Beneito, 2003; Bianchi et al, 2014; Kotlar et al, 2013; Llopis & D'Este, 2022; Sikimic et al, 2016; Un, 2015).…”

Gatekeeper Networks, Knowledge Inertia, and Knowledge Performance in Business Incubators

“…As an extension of Burt's (1992) famous theory of structural holes, one can equate the role of the gatekeeper to filling holes between two network participants or unconnected parts of the network as a whole, thus connecting them and generating value by transferring resources from one participant, or part of the network, to another (Burt, 1992). Therefore, when two incubatees do not communicate with one another and are not connected through a strong third party, there is a structural hole between them (Reagans & McEvily, 2016); whereas, when gatekeepers connect different actors, gatekeepers are able to help those actors to gain more diverse knowledge (Le Gallo & Plunket, 2020;Llopis & D'Este, 2022). In this study, the authors consider the business incubator manager as the gatekeeper and aim to examine the impact of their intervention on knowledge interaction among incubatees.…”

“…The knowledge base is an important moderator that can facilitate the development of a business (Zacharias et al, 2021). Additionally, gatekeepers connect different actors, such as project team members and companies in industrial parks, enabling a broader range of knowledge acquisition (Le Gallo & Plunket, 2020;Gilsing et al, 2008;Llopis & D'Este, 2022).…”

Knowledge‐brokering activities as enactors of innovative constructive deviance in open R&D projects

“…Still, little is known about the role of knowledge brokering (Conklin et al., 2013; Del Giudice and Maggioni, 2014) as a means of fostering innovative behaviors in OI contexts (Chesbrough and Bogers, 2014). Indeed, while past work has shown that KBs work closely with stakeholders to facilitate the transfer and exchange of relevant information (Bornbaum et al., 2015), most studies have focused on the analysis of external brokering while neglecting internal brokering, especially regarding the positive impact of KBs involved in co‐creation activities (Llopis and d'Este, 2022).…”

“…This study's contributions are threefold. First, we enrich the microfoundation (i.e., individual innovative behavior) perspective of the OI literature (Bogers, Foss, et al., 2018; Locatelli et al., 2021; Xia et al., 2023), and complement the research investigating the brokerage – innovation relationship (Llopis and d'Este, 2022), by uncovering the role of internal knowledge brokering in enacting ICD behaviors. Second, we shed light on ICD's determinants.…”