The digital footprint of innovators: Using email to detect the most creative people in your organization
arXiv:2105.10247 · doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.04.025
Abstract
We propose a novel method for finding the most innovative people in an organization, using email to analyze structure and dynamics of the organization's online communication. To illustrate our approach, we analyzed the email archive of 2000 members of the R&D department of a US multinational company. We use metrics of social network analysis extended with meta-data of interaction dynamics to calculate features for individual employees: their network positions, messages sent and received, pings to others and response times. We find a distinction between innovation group leaders and subject matter experts focused on publishing papers and patents. Innovation administrators have a higher number of direct contacts, are more committed in conversations and receive more messages than they send. We also found significant differences between innovators oriented towards internal awards and innovators more concerned with external recognition of their work.
References in corpus (5)
- The power of reciprocal knowledge sharing relationships for startup success
- The impact of virtual mirroring on customer satisfaction
- Forecasting managerial turnover through e-mail based social network analysis
- Measuring the impact of spammers on e-mail and Twitter networks
- Finding top performers through email patterns analysis