Social-Network-Analysis-Based Models for Innovation Research

Abstract

Due to environmental changes arising from rapid technology advancements, innovation trends have changed and new innovation trends have emerged. The development of the Internet and information technology has led to a flexible and open environment, which enables to create new knowledge at no charge through the recombination of existing resources and new ideas. In this context, the concept of products has been expanded from tangible goods to intangible goods. Furthermore, with the continuous development and release of new products, market structure has been experiencing changes as well. Yet, although numerous studies on innovation have already been conducted in various fields, most of them are not sufficient to describe innovation trends represented in these changing environments. Therefore, this dissertation suggests new models for understanding actual innovation trends by addressing shortcomings shown in previous research. Models used in two different studies are designed by applying the social network analysis that is suitable to reflect dynamic properties and to identify innovation opportunities, respectively.<br/> The first study focuses on individual software service, which is made freely accessible and can be reused for developing a new composite software service, and investigates innovation performance of software services. The results show that software services exhibit different life cycle patterns in the diffusion stage of the innovation life cycle. Software services, which stayed in the ecosystem for over 87 months or have frequently been used, show a bell-shaped life cycle. This indicates that innovation trends in intangible goods are similar to those in durable and tangible goods. The results also show that software service sales do not solely depend on sales of the service itself but also on the use of a software service together with other software services.<br/> The second study focuses on product features, which comprise product and represent technological innovation, and describes product innovation and firms interaction at product-level. The results show that innovation patterns are detected in the evolutionary process of products, and the inter-firm and intra-firm evolutionary patterns are observed through the constructed product network. This contributes to the extension of research on product evolution by conducting the analysis at product-level instead of firm-level, and helps decision makers to establish strategies for the development of new products.<br/> Overall, this dissertation contributes to the research on innovation and provides both academic and managerial implications. The academic implication is that this dissertation proposes the methodology capable of addressing new innovation trends according to the environmental changes and extends theories related to the innovation research. The managerial implication is that this dissertation gives meaningful insights regarding management and new product development to decision makers.<br/>