About the Authors
Rob Cross is an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Business in Charlottesville,
Virginia. He can be reached at robcross@virginia.edu.
Jane C. Linder is an executive research fellow at the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business in Wellesley,
Massachusetts. She can be reached at
jane.c.linder@accenture.com.
Andrew Parker is a doctoral candidate at Stanford University in Stanford,
California. He can be reached at
anparker@stanford.edu.
About the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business
The Accenture Institute for High Performance Business creates strategic insights into key management issues through original research and analysis. Its management researchers combine world-class reputations with Accenture’s extensive consulting, technology and outsourcing experience to conduct innovative research and analysis into how organizations become and remain high-performance businesses.
Notes
1 Among others see D. Goleman et. al., “Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance,” Harvard Business Review (December 2001) 42-51; L. Belkhir et. al., “One CEO’s Product Development Motto: Care for Innovations Like Newborns!” Strategy & Leadership 31 (2003) 4-11.
2 The exceptions to this statement are work on charismatic leadership (which is limited in impact to a leader’s direct contacts) and flow (which is focused on fleeting, individual engagement with a task). A network view generates ways of intervening that will have a more pervasive effect on innovation in an organization.
3 N.P. Repenning, “A Simulation-Based Approach to Understanding the Dynamics of Innovation Implementation,” Organizational Science 13 (March-April 2002) 109-127; C.M. Fiol and E.J. O’Connor, “When Hot and Cold Collide in Radical Change Processes: Lessons from Community Development,” Organizational Science 13 (September-October 2002) 532-546.
4 R. Cross, W. Baker and A. Parker, “What Creates Energy in Organizations?” MIT Sloan Management Review 44 (summer 2003) 51-57; R. Cross and A. Parker, The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
5 G. Tellis and P. Golder, Will and Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets (McGraw Hill, 2001); W. Eberhard, “Power and Innovation: A Two-Center Theory” International Studies of Management & Organization 7 (spring 1977) 47-70. This study of 233 innovations and their results showed that de-energized initiatives took longer and generated less value.
6 F. Johansson, The Medici Effect (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
7 H. Chesbrough, Open Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, 2003).
8 J. Linder, S. Jarvenpaa and T. Davenport, “Innovation Sourcing Strategy Matters,”
MIT Sloan Management Review 44 (summer 2003) 43–49.
9 J. Martin and P. Frost, “The Organizational Culture War Games: A Struggle for Intellectual Dominance,” in S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy and W. Nord, eds., Handbook of Organization Studies (Sage, 1996) 599-621.
10 J. Linder, “Visible Options,” Strategy & Leadership 33 (October 2005) 24-30.
11 T. Allen, Managing the Flow of Technology (MIT Press, 1977); W. Baker, Achieving Success through Social Capital (Jossey-Bass, 2000); J.A.C. Baum, ed., Companion to Organizations (Blackwell, 2000); R. Burt, Structural Holes (Harvard University Press, 1992); M.T. Hansen, “The Search-Transfer Problem: The Role of Weak Ties in Sharing Knowledge across Organization Subunits,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44 (March 1999) 82-111; B. Uzzi, “Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness,” Administrative Science Quarterly 42 (March 1997) 35-67.