- 著者
-
中本 龍市
- 出版者
- 日本経営学会
- 雑誌
- 日本経営学会誌 (ISSN:18820271)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.32, pp.94-104, 2013-11-20 (Released:2017-08-01)
This research examines the relationship between research mobilization and performance of basic research. We focus on the impact of resource mobilization through "a colleague of a colleague" on a focal researcher's performance. Reflecting experiences in daily life, people can understand that a person who can cooperate with "a friend of a friend" gain more benefits than a person who have a friend's cooperation. Innovation cannot be realized only by technology or ideas alone. Rather, innovation needs two different factors : "knowledge creation" and "resource mobilization" (Takeishi et al., 2008; 2012). Previous research has extensively discussed "knowledge creation" but few scholars treat "resource mobilization". Thus, this paper analyses the scope of resource mobilization. As Burt (2010) contributes to this research field and makes a network variable to measure "second-hand" network resources, we develop his research framework. Our working hypothesis is that researchers who can gain access to second-hand network resources, or "a colleague of a colleague", achieve more than researchers who cannot. We use patent data from Japan to examine our hypothesis. Our data contains 310 researchers from two second-tier pharmaceutical companies : Shionogi and Chugai. Results show that the effect of "a colleague of a colleague" has complex impacts on researchers' performance. From a structural viewpoint, the impact of a colleague is negative but that of "a colleague of a colleague" is positive, on the other hand, from a relational viewpoint, it leads to the opposite results. Project leaders in pharmaceutical companies face difficulties to integrate differentiated research teams in order to produce new drugs. In fact, several companies have restructured the internal research process. Our results suggest that they have to achieve a balance between first-hand and second-hand network effects and not to depend on one side only.