The flow of ideas and timing of evaluation as determinants of knowledge creation

There are different perspectives on the study of knowledge inorganizations, developed in economics, sociology, anthropologyand organization theory. Several authors followed Schumpeter'sidea that innovations are new combinations of existing knowledgeand incremental learning. Kogut and Zander further developedthis idea and defined knowledge as a portfolio of options, andemphasized the importance of combinative capacities in knowledgecreation. In a similar vein, Garud and Nayyar developed a notionof the transformative capacitiy of a firm in analyzing technologicalinnovations. This paper follows in this tradition by pointingat the effects of different organizational structures on theflow of ideas and on the possibility of combining proposalsin organizations. Communication structures, span of controland timing of evaluation are shown, using computer simulations,to have a large impact on the degree to which commonalitiesand complementarities among ideas and proposals can be detectedand on the eventual combination of ideas for knowledge creation.Implications for organizational design are discussed.