INDIRECT SOCIAL CAPITAL AND OPEN INNOVATION

摘要

The proposed research seeks to demonstrate that indirect social capital has a positive effect on open innovation (OI) output. Specifically, it focuses on the roles played by trust and knowledge diversity in leveraging indirect social capital for OI returns through a trusted bridging chain made up of individuals referred to the chain through trust relations. Essentially, indirect social capital can be seen as the returns derived specifically from indirect relationships, either through a chain of referred relationships or through by-chance relationships. Indirect social capital may therefore be defined as 'information or knowledge (new or improved resources) made available to individuals or collectivities through a trusted bridging chain or through (by-chance) indirect relationships'. Studies on innovation networks show the importance of both supporting relations (depicting trust) and bridging relations (representing access to diverse information) for innovation returns. In essence, it is argued that individual A will ask individual B to help solve an innovation problem or to find another person (C) who can solve it, if A thinks B has benevolence-based trust in A, and A has competence-based trust in B. Hence, competence-based trust would drive the quality of the chain and thus the innovation solutions submitted. Typically, the search horizon for external innovations is at a single (direct) level, representing mostly direct relationships between the focal organisation (or intermediary) and the innovators. Studies on OI suggest that organisations can over-search, as too many diverse relationships can become less effective and more expensive. So there is an opportunity to develop an OI search "filter" to facilitate external search. Studies on OI have not openly covered either the role of ordinary individuals' indirect relationships in innovation searches, or the context and nature of dyadic external relations per se. Studies on social networking, such as small-world studies, demonstrate how new or enhanced resources can be obtained using an instrumental search through supporting relations, alongside "short paths" formed through bridging relations, in effect resulting in a chain. The context and nature of a search chain have not featured much in such studies, though. Furthermore, in most social networking studies diversity is identified by measuring structural holes (the disconnects between direct relations to an ego) or the strength of ties (particularly weak ties). Yet, the latter measurement has not always proven to be a proxy for diversity, and analysing structural holes requires access to network ties around the ego and not merely a dyadic relation. This study suggests an improved measurement of dyadic tie diversity that encompasses knowledge and geographic distance between individuals in a dyadic relationship. Considering the importance of diversity for innovation per se, it is argued that a chain that bridges knowledge and geographic boundaries may better deliver innovative solutions. A trusted bridging chain could reach across the world to solve a developing-world problem in the developed world, for example. Finally, the proposed study puts forward levels of social capital - direct and indirect - to help define social capital better. The research problem requires an outcome-driven analysis based on variance logic, and a quasi-experiment to set up the necessary treatment to examine the proposed relationship between indirect social capital and OI with hypothesised relationships.