Holding investments in R&D constant, what makes organizations more innovative? That question sits behind every project at the lab.
Understanding innovation takes a multi-level approach. Our work runs from the widest level to the narrowest.
Between organizations
Inter-organizational networks and collaborative ecosystems enable organizations to share knowledge, expertise, and resources, fostering innovation in new products, services, and technologies.
Within organizations
Informal intra-organizational networks connect scientists, researchers, managers, engineers, and creatives, facilitating the exchange of knowledge, expertise, and diverse perspectives. These networks support the development and implementation of innovative ideas, driving internal innovation and technological advancements.
Organizational context
Organizational contexts and human resource management systems, including structures, processes, work design, and organizational culture, create environments conducive to innovation at the individual, team, and organizational levels.
Teams
Team-level factors sustain innovation and creativity. They include team composition and structure (for example task and goal interdependence, team size, and team longevity) as well as key team processes: visioning, decision-making, psychological safety, support for innovation, task orientation, cohesion, internal and external communication, and managing task and relationship conflict.
Individuals
The micro-foundations of innovation include individual cognitive styles and processes, personality traits, knowledge backgrounds, motivational drivers, and leadership behaviors that influence creative problem-solving, knowledge creation, and innovation within organizations.
The lab's activities are organized in programs, each led by a scientific director.
Scientific directorGiuseppe Soda
How scientists, engineers and managers pool their knowledge to create innovations. The program asks what makes one organization more innovative than another when spending on R&D is held constant.
Scientific directorPier Vittorio Mannucci
How the structure of social networks helps groups generate good ideas. The focus is on social brokers and small-world networks, and on how to get ideas flowing between subgroups.
Scientific directorPier Vittorio Mannucci
How promising ideas move through four stages (generation, elaboration, championing and implementation) and which patterns of collaboration and networking suit each stage.
Scientific directorMarco Tortoriello
How firms recognize, access and integrate knowledge from outside. Network analysis is used to understand where, with whom and how these relationships form.
Scientific directorMarco Tortoriello
A comparison of centralized and decentralized R&D, and a study of how knowledge moves between a central hub and peripheral labs through formal and informal networks.
Scientific directorRonald Stuart Burt
A search for reliable network metrics of the micro environments that managers create around them, based on email and HR data collected over several years of organizational change.