The Social Networking of R&D

Networks and so-called social network analysis are going through a phase of intellectual ferment and great creativity. The interest in these subjects cuts across a large swath of disciplines, not only economics and management, but also sociology, physics, biology, psychology, and anthropology.
Amid such strong multidisciplinarity, an important place is taken by those research studies that seek to understand the role of networks in the processes of technological and organizational innovation.
In order to provide a reason for this, three major considerations need to be made.
Firstly, due to growing technological complexity, no firm, no matter how large, possesses all the knowledge and skills needed to innovate. It is thus fundamental to establish co-operative research relations with external actors (competitors, suppliers, customers etc). Through the relations it forms, the firm occupies a specific position in the overall network of relations between firms, and between firms and external actors. Most importantly, such a position affects market opportunities and technological knowledge, thus being an explanatory factor of innovative and competitive performance.
Secondly, the economics of scientific and technological research must be considered. Two fundamental and interdependent trends emerge: growing individual specialization and more frequent use of team collaborations (as shown by the increase in the number of authors per scientific article or of inventors per patent).The emerging network of scientific and technological collaborations and the position each researcher occupies in the network are able to explain, ceteris paribus, either the quantity of articles and/or patents produced or the degree of creativity and impact of such output, measured in terms of the number and quality of citations, and consequently the career patterns of individual researchers.
Thirdly, social networks (of formal, informal and professional collaboration) are powerful mechanisms through which scientific and technological knowledge spreads across time and space.
In particular, various recent studies show how the geographic localization of knowledge flows, i.e. the ability of these geographic areas to be the first in seizing on the opportunities created by innovation, is to be attributed to two concomitant phenomena.
Firstly, inter-firm mobility of skilled labor is circumscribed at the geographic level. Secondly, the propensity to strike agreements of collaboration decreases rapidly with geographical distance.
While there is a sizable body of studies on social and organizational networks and their effects on the performance of agents involved, we know a lot less about the forces behind the creation, evolution, and dynamics of networks. The research frontier is currently about understanding how a social network of scientific and technological collaboration emerges, evolves, and changes its structure over time.