Innovation and Knowledge Communities

Book excerpt: Breakthroughs in science and technology increasingly happen outside of firms in informal interorganizational communities of innovators. The effort of a group on a specific topic across firms, expertise, and geography can function as an emergent organizational form, capable of great productivity. Using data from computer science, basic research, and management strategy to identify and study these intense clusters of innovators, or “knowledge communities,” this book illuminates the new organizational logics that govern such collective success.