Knowledge specialization, knowledge brokerage, and the uneven growth of technology

domains

Gianluca Carnabuci Jeroen Bruggeman

Forthcoming in Social Forces

Goal: explain knowledge growth

• Evolutionary (Schumpeterian) outlook: variation of cultural elements through innovation, as recombination of existing cultural elements

• Focus on network of ideas referring to other ideas (not the institutional or organizational context of innovation)

Literature

• Specialization (exploitation), requires investment but then becomes efficient

• Brokerage (exploration), higher chance of novelty but higher risk and lower efficiency

• Combinations of both strategies, as a balance, sequence, or in parallel

Towards model

• Knowledge brokerage: recombining heterogeneous ideas from different sources

• Knowledge specialization: recombining closely related, homogeneous, ideas

• Both are endpoints of a continuum• To avoid contradiction, keep apart

specialization as a property, and a process of recombining ideas from a progressively more homogeneous pool

Specialization

Model: variation of Burt’s

Main difference: self-specialization (analogous to ‘self-constraint’) added

Conjectures

• Brokerage beneficial if followed by process of specialization

• Once combinatory potential of latter runs dry, alternate with brokerage

• Cyclical pattern of innovation?

Innovation strategy of specialization and brokerageIs oscillating, not cyclical

Source: P.Turchin (2003)

Data

• 2 million patents (USPTO),16 million citations during 1975-1999, into 5 year intervals

• Analysis at level of (418) technology domains corresponding to fields, i.e. epistemic communities of organizations and individuals sharing knowledge, norms, & reputation system

• Knowledge growth: # patents weighted by # citations

Discussion & Conclusion

• Conjectures confirmed

• In later study, Carnabuci found stronger confirmation at organizational level

• Supposidly also hold for individuals and in different (other than technological) fields