Past research revealed that social networks play a decisive role for the receipt of new knowledge by engineers and middle‐level managers and, thus, essentially contribute to innovation. However, the question of by which network ties top managers – that is, the key organizational...

Past research has revealed that knowledge integration is an important prerequisite for the success of new product development. For this reason, companies deploy a number of formal mechanisms to foster integration across multiple functions and hierarchical levels. In many SMEs, however, such...

Social network ties enable collaborative creation and sharing of ideas between knowledge workers. Thus, these ties play an important role in organizational innovation as well as for the personal success of the innovators. However, scholars tend to focus only on the information benefits,...