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• Article | Strategic Management Journal | January 2020

  Jack of All Trades and Master of Knowledge: The Role of Diversification in New Distant Knowledge Integration

  Frank Nagle and Florenta Teodoridis

  We consider the role of individual-level diversification as a mechanism through which skilled researchers engage in successful exploration—recognizing and integrating new knowledge external to one’s domains of expertise. To approach an ideal experiment, we (1) employ a matching procedure and (2) exploit the unexpected adoption of Microsoft Kinect as a motion-sensing technology in research. We evaluate the impact of Kinect and its embodiment of new knowledge on a set of ability-matched, diversity-varying researchers without prior experience in motion sensing and find that diversified researchers explore more successfully than their more specialized peers. We also examine the role of personal preferences and professional incentives as antecedents of diversification and find that culture, age, and intellectual freedom are positively associated with the propensity to diversify successfully.

  Keywords: individual-level knowledge diversification; novel knowledge; Knowledge Acquisition; Diversification; Innovation and Invention; Research;

  Citation:

  Nagle, Frank, and Florenta Teodoridis. "Jack of All Trades and Master of Knowledge: The Role of Diversification in New Distant Knowledge Integration." Strategic Management Journal 41, no. 1 (January 2020): 55–85.  View Details

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• Article | Strategy & Leadership | 2019

  Overcoming Cultural Resistance to Open Source Innovation

  John Winsor, Jin Hyun Paik, Michael Tushman and Karim R. Lakhani

  Purpose: This article offers insight on how to effectively help incumbent organizations prepare for global business shifts to open source and digital business models.
  Design/methodology/approach: Discussion related to observation, experience and case studies related to incumbent organizations and their efforts to adopt open source models and business tools.
  Findings: Companies that let their old culture reject the new risk becoming obsolete if doing so inhibits their rethinking of their future using powerful tools like crowdsourcing, blockchain, customer experience-based connections, integrating workflows with artificial intelligence (AI), automated technologies and digital business platforms. These new ways of working affect how and where work is done, access to information, an organization’s capacity for work and its efficiency. As important as technological proficiency is, managing the cultural shift required to embrace transformative industry architecture – the key to innovating new business models -- may be the bigger challenge.
  Research limitations/implications: Findings are based on original research and case studies. Insights are theoretically, based on additional study, interviews, and research, but need to be tested through additional case studies.
  Practical implications: The goal is to make the transition more productive and less traumatic for incumbent firms by providing a language and tested methods to help senior leaders use innovative technologies to build on their core even as they explore new business models.
  Social implications: This article provides insights that will lead to more effective ideas for helping organizations adapt.
  Originality/value: This article is based on original research and case experience. That research and experience has then been analyzed and viewed through the lens of models that have been known to work. The result is original insights and findings that can be applied in new ways to further adoption within incumbent organizations.

  Keywords: open source innovation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Business Model; Technological Innovation; Collaborative Innovation and Invention;

  Citation:

  Winsor, John, Jin Hyun Paik, Michael Tushman, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Overcoming Cultural Resistance to Open Source Innovation." Strategy & Leadership 47, no. 6 (2019): 28–33.  View Details

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• Working Paper | 2019

  The Impact of Professionals' Contributions to Online Knowledge Communities on Their Workplace Knowledge Work

  Hila Lifshitz - Assaf and Frank Nagle

  Knowledge work is becoming increasingly challenging as pace of change in the knowledge frontier is increasing. Organizations have created multiple mechanisms to minimize knowledge gaps and increase learning such internal training, mentorship programs as well as encouraging their professionals to exchange knowledge outside the boundaries of the organization. Reaching outside the organizational boundaries for knowledge exchange has changed dramatically in the last decade with the rise of online professionals communities. In the case of computer science and software engineering it has become a norm to learn and as questions that used to be kept within the boundaries of the organizations, externally, with a community of external professionals help answer and learn. It is less clear whether contributing to such online communities helps improve professionals’ knowledge work or becomes a competing or distracting force from their work place knowledge work. This is the empiric puzzle our study has set to explore. We conducted a mixed method study combining qualitative data from more than 100 interviews with software professionals with a unique quantitative dataset measuring software professionals’ code productivity in their workplace by the hour/every week for one to two years.

  Keywords: open source; future of work; software development; knowledge work; online community; Learning; Knowledge Sharing; Software; Open Source Distribution; Performance Productivity;

  Citation:

  Lifshitz - Assaf, Hila, and Frank Nagle. "The Impact of Professionals' Contributions to Online Knowledge Communities on Their Workplace Knowledge Work." Working Paper, April 2019.  View Details

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