(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell uttered the indelible words, “Mr.Watson, come here, I want to see you,” and ushered in a new era. Thomas A. Watson, by most accounts, played a critical role in the invention of the telephone as we know it today. Yet Bell got the patent, most of the money, and virtually all of the fame associated with that invention—and Watson got relegated to a historical footnote.
A team of scholars has taken a close look at people like Watson. “[Everyone knows] about the leaders, the Steve Jobses and the Tim Cooks,” says Marco Tortoriello, an associate professor of strategic management at the IESE Business School at the University of Navarra in Barcelona, Spain. “But there are all sorts of organizational roles that seldom, if ever, get the spotlight.” Tortoriello and his colleagues focus in particular on “catalysts”—people who enable innovation by bringing special forms of knowledge to bear on that process. Catalysts are, for the most part, distinct from “innovators.” The latter group, in this formulation, includes those who get credit for developing new forms of knowledge.
To investigate the relationship between innovators and catalysts, the scholars studied the research and development division of a company that specialized in generating patents for different kinds of computer chips. The scholars identified the innovators among that group by studying employee performance reports and by analyzing the number of patent applications that each researcher filed. Identifying catalysts was a more subjective exercise. In interviews with researchers, Tortoriello asked them to indicate which colleagues were most active in providing valuable knowledge that aided the innovation process. The catalysts, in short, were those with a reputation for “spark[ing] ideas” in other researchers, says David Krackhardt, professor of organizations and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
As it turns out, idea-sparking employees are relatively rare—albeit less rare than idea-generating employees. About 14 percent of the researchers covered in the study were catalysts, and about 8 percent were innovators. Only about 1.5 percent of them were both catalysts and innovators.
The impact that the catalysts in the study had on fellow researchers was striking: “All it took was having one catalyst in an innovator’s network to almost double [his or her] patent rates,” Krackhardt notes. To be effective, he explains, a catalyst must combine two attributes. First, he or she needs to be part of a “closed network”—a group of people within an organization who have overlapping ties to each other. Second, he or she needs to have access to a diverse array of information that is external to the group. “Part of being a catalyst is that you’re in touch with different kinds of knowledge sources,” says Krackhardt.
At the time of the study, Andrea Cuomo was an executive vice president at the computer-chip company. He took part in commissioning the research and also helped test-drive its results. “After analyzing the paper, we decided to move certain people into different labs,” he says. Doing so, he notes, allowed the company to accelerate its patent-creation process. Cuomo also suggests a deeper lesson that he took away from the study: “The real organization [of a company] has nothing to do with what appears on an organization chart.”
David Krackhardt, Bill McEvily, and Marco Tortoriello, “Being a Catalyst of Innovation: The Role of Knowledge Diversity and Network Closure,” Organization Science, December 26, 2014 (online publication).
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.