Technology Brokering and Innovation in a Product Development Firm

February 16, 2021 Jeremiah Hendren

Technology Brokering and Innovation in a Product Development Firm

Hargadon*, Andrew, and Robert I. Sutton**
Administrative Science Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1997): 716-749
https://doi.org/10.2307/2393655

* Professor at UC Davis
** Professor at Stanford

Knowledge is imperfectly shared over time and across people, organizations, and industries. Ideas from one group might solve the problems of another, but only if connections between existing solutions and problems can be made across the boundaries between them. When such connections are made, existing ideas often appear new and creative as they change form, combining with other ideas to meet the needs of different users. These new combinations are objectively new concepts or objects because they are built from existing but previously unconnected ideas. This paper presents an ethnographic study of a product design firm that routinely creates new products by making such connections. The role these connections can play in the innovation process is evident in inventions by Thomas Edison's laboratory. Edison and his colleagues used their knowledge of electromagnetic power from the telegraph industry, where they first worked, to transfer old ideas that were new to the lighting, telephone, phonograph, railway, and mining industries (...). Edison's products often reflected blends of existing but previously unconnected ideas that his engineers picked up as they worked in these disparate industries. The phonograph blended old ideas from products that these engineers had developed for the telegraph, telephone, and electric motor industries, as well as ideas developed by others that they had learned about while working in those industries. Edison's inventions were not wholly original. Like most creative acts and products, they were extensions and blends of existing knowledge (…). As Usher (…) argued, “invention finds its distinctive feature in the constructive assimilation of pre-existing elements into new syntheses, new patterns, or new configurations of behavior.”

Andrew Hargadon & Robert I. Sutton

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