| Popis: |
As global competition is increasingly intensified, radical innovation has become more and more important for corporations in high-velocity industries. Thanks to the advances of information systems and communication media, corporations can easily reach out to experts all over the world and form project teams dedicated to the innovation effort. However, research shows that while some innovation teams are very successful in achieving significant breakthroughs, many struggle to make their collaborations work. In this dissertation, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the collaboration challenges that an innovation team faces. By considering the simultaneous needs for differentiation and integration in the innovation effort and taking a communication/ interpretive perspective, we develop a theoretical model to investigate how the processes of differentiation and integration are shaped through team communication and influence an innovation team's collaboration outcomes. Specifically, we delineate four structural properties of team communication to capture these two processes - the number of issue streams explored, the number of attention switches initiated, the conceptual linkage between issue streams, and the level of deliberation after each attention switch - and identify four categories of factors that influence the development of these two processes - team composition, semi-structures, communication contexts, and communication environments. We conduct a case study as a preliminary test of our theoretical model, and find that the model provides comprehensive explanations for the collaboration dynamics and issues of these teams. We believe such a theoretical model can contribute to a better understanding of the complexity involved in an innovation project and bring fresh insights to the design of information systems for supporting an innovation team. |
