Recognizing Innovation Through Social Network Analysis: the Case of the Virtual eBMS Project

Advances in communication technologies have enabled organizations to acquire and retain distributed organizational structures by supporting coordination among people working from different locations. Today’s managers need to rely on methodologies and tools to map and continuously monitor the evolution of the hidden relationships within and across organizations. We propose and apply a Social Network Scorecard to monitor how an interdisciplinary and inter-organizational project team – with members from academia and industry – has been able to successfully collaborate to implement a technological platform integrating Knowledge Management, e-Learning, e-Business and Project Management. This platform, called “Virtual eBMS”, represents a collaborative working environment enabling knowledge sharing and learning processes within a higher education institution, the e-Business Management Section (eBMS), a department of Scuola Superiore ISUFI, University of Salento, Italy. We used the team working to design the Virtual eBMS as test bed to test the validity of the scorecard. We observed how this tool could help in monitoring the evolution of an organizational community, recognizing innovative roles and phases and finding structural properties connected to innovative outcomes. Looking at trends at individual, team and (inter-)organizational level, we identified the most innovative phases within the team’s life cycle, using network indicators like density and degree centrality. The Network Scorecard provided feedback on the effectiveness of the team working to create the integrated platform and helped discover the phases in which the team acted in a manner conducive to innovation.We recognized in the Virtual eBMS project team the typical structure of an innovative knowledge network where learning networks and innovation networks co-exist with a more sparse interest network.