Andrew B Hargadon

University of California, Davis | UCD · Graduate School of Management

The dominant online platform companies are now the most valuable companies in the world, and their growing power over other organizations is enabling them to rewrite the rules of business strategy. In the past decade, digital platforms have profoundly reorganized markets and industries and redefined the dynamics of value creation and competition.1...

Technological innovation is a double-edged sword. It can help solve major problems, such as how to treat cancer, and can be an engine of economic growth, but it can also cost jobs, such as when automation replaces people Both aspects raise issues that have major but so far little-recognized policy implications. One such issue is that new technologi...

Purpose – The author explains that changing both the company’s offerings and its organization exponentially increases the complexity and uncertainty of any new undertaking, which is why business model innovation is both so difficult and, when successful, so hard for competitors to respond to. Design/methodology/approach – The example of how SolarC...

This article examines the concept of brokerage models of innovation. It discusses the principles of brokerage theories and explains that while traditional models of innovation focus on the generation of novel solutions, brokerage theories focus on how managers recognize and recombine existing resources. Brokerage models of innovation also highlight...

To remain successful, companies must respond to the challenge of achieving continual internal or core growth. But how is this done, and why do some strategies work better than others? In The Search for Organic Growth, leading writers on business strategy and organization offer authoritative analysis and practical guidance on implementing a strategy...

In the last half century, venture capitalists have financed many of the most important new U.S. technology-based industries. This chapter poses the question of whether Clean Technology is an industry, suggesting that this is not the case. After explaining the three key structural characteristics of technologies and markets in which venture capital...

In a search for Schumpetetian solutions, the Obama Administration has made venture capital a comerstone of its Clean Technology policy, adopting a strategy of providing large loan guarantees to a few venture capital-financed firms. This article argues that three key conditions are necessary for venture capital to successfully open new economic spac...

UC Davis and its partners are addressing the need for innovation and entrepreneurship in graduate education and training. This paper will showcase the Designated Emphasis in Biotechnology graduate education program, cross-disciplinary partnerships and technology brokering. These interactions can bring diverse groups of individuals together to trans...

Policies aimed at spurring a clean technology revolution show little understanding of the innovation process, how it drives technological change, and how it builds on, as much as builds, new markets. "Clean technology" describes renewable energies like wind, solar, and nuclear; energy efficiency; environmentally sustainable materials and manufactur...

The article discusses lessons about entrepreneurship as a set of skills taught at the University of California at Davis and suggests its importance to all students. Lessons include concentrating on connecting existing inventions rather than inventing new ones, the importance of networks of investors, employees, suppliers, distributors and users, an...

T his paper introduces a model of collective creativity that explains how the locus of creative problem solving shifts, at times, from the individual to the interactions of a collective. The model is grounded in observations, interviews, informal conversations, and archival data gathered in intensive field studies of work in professional service fi...

We propose that organizations use a new framework of workday design to enhance the creativity of today's chronically overworked professionals. Although insights from creativity research have been integrated into models of work design to increase the stimulants of creativity (e.g., intrinsic motivation), this has not led to work design models that h...

Abstract This chapter argues that creativity remains an elusive construct because, in action, it entails two distinct, concurrent, yet often opposing processes that embed an individual within their particular social context: bridging and building. On the one hand, creativity requires bridging multiple worlds—recognizing patterns and connections bet...

Using the established definition of situated cognition in organizations as "the interaction of cognitive schemas and organizational context" (Lant 2002), we examine empirical case studies from the last 15 years to illustrate what situated cognitions in organizations might actually look like. Grounded in this research, we develop a framework that id...

Purpose The author has spent the last ten years studying the innovation process in modern organizations and found that the most successful firms pursue an innovation strategy termed technology brokering . Design/methodology/approach How are the objectives achieved? Include the main method(s) used for the research. What is the approach to the topic...

This paper presents a model of innovation, knowledge brokering, that explains how some organizations are able to routinely innovate by recombining their past knowledge in new ways. While existing theories of organizational learning and innovation are useful, the links between them are crucial for understanding how existing knowledge becomes the raw...

This paper finds that traditional "economistic" perspectives ignore the social and organizational dimensions within which the acquisition process is embedded. In tandem with the economist's erasure of the social; the temporal and processual dimensions were ignored. Put differently, acquisitions are treated as point-in-time events occurring in an en...

At times knowledge can be seen as the source of organizational innovation and change—at other times, however, it can be the very constraint on that change. This conflicted role offers in-sights into why the phenomenon of organizational knowledge has been interpreted by researchers in multiple and possibly conflicting ways. Some theories depict know...

This paper considers the role of design, as the emergent arrangement of concrete details that embodies a new idea, in mediating between innovations and established institutional fields as entrepreneurs attempt to introduce change. Analysis of Thomas Edison's system of electric lighting offers insights into how the grounded details of an innovation'...

Presently, designers of interactive narratives and video games have only a slender understanding of the aesthetic experiences their audiences and us- ers seek. Using schema theory, this study articu- lates the two varieties of aesthetic pleasures that users of interactive works enjoy: immersion and engagement. It uses schema theory to define the ch...

This paper presents field work that challenges existing metaphors of knowledge work as a process shaped by machine or market forces. Instead, as people in organizations jointly engage in the generation of solutions, each exchange between individuals represents both the production and distribution of knowledge; each exchange is valued in multiple (o...

New ideas are the precious currency of the new economy, but generating them doesn't have to be a mysterious process. The image of the lone genius inventing from scratch is a romantic fiction. Businesses that constantly innovate have systematized the production and testing of new ideas, and the system can be replicated by practically any organizatio...

While few critics writing on readers and hypertext have focused on the affective pleasures of reading hypertext fiction or interactive narratives like Myst, those who assess the experience of reading them tend to assume interactive texts should be either immersive or engaging. This study uses schema theory to define the characteristics of immersion...

Groups play a central role in organizational creativity, a role that becomes evident when these interactions are viewed as part of a larger organizational context. Research on creativity and innovation in organizations has traditionally focused on the role of groups as context for individual cognition and action. This paper draws from recent resear...

A set of firms exists whose output consists solely of innovative solutions to novel problems, and whose long-term success depends on their ability to continuously innovate. These firms act as knowledge brokers, spanning multiple industries to innovate by transferring knowledge from where it is known to where it is not. They are often consultants to...

We blend network and organizational memory perspectives in a model of technology brokering that explains how an organization develops innovative products. The model is grounded in observations, interviews, informal conversations, and archived data gathered during an ethnography of IDEO, a product design firm. This firm exploits its network position...

Experimental research indicates that people in face-to-face brainstorming meetings are less efficient at generating ideas than when working alone, This so-called productivity loss has led many brainstorming researchers to conclude that there is overwhelming evidence for the ineffectiveness of these sessions, We question this conclusion because it i...

We combine network and organizational memory perspectives in a process model of innovation through technology brokering. We show how a product design firm uses internal routines to exploit links to over 40 industries, creating new products for clients by combining existing, but previously unknown technologies from a range of industries.

A model is presented in which individuals in an organization choose between experimenting with an emerging organizational routine or exploiting an existing one. The decision of whether to spend their slack time experimenting reflects the amount of local slack available, the inherent productivity of the existing and emerging routines, and the percep...

Este libro plantea un enfoque amplio de la innovación, un fenómeno que va más allá de los cambios técnicos o de la promoción y la distribución, dos de los medios más usuales con los que las empresas pueden conseguir ventajas competitivas. En primer lugar, centra la atención en el hecho de que la innovación con éxito es el resultado de una planifici...