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on a similar, highly successful, initiative in the United States (the Greenwood
Genetic Centre). However, the competition for funding incurred by the GKP
initiative had the perverse unintended consequence of actually disrupting
many of the informal networks that already existed in the genetics community
(and which were not organized on a regional basis). Moreover, while new
collaborations did eventually start to produce some innovative projects, these
took a long time to establish. Unimpressed by what they saw as lack of prog-
ress within the GKPs, the UK government announced that no further funding
would be available after the initial five years of what had been expected to be
a ten-year programme. This announcement was made in year three leading
many of the knowledge workers involved to abandon the progamme for jobs
elsewhere.
As this example illustrates, efforts to manage knowledge for innovation must
pay attention to the networks (both formal and informal) through which knowl-
edge in specific fields and contexts is produced and communicated, especially
where innovation processes span knowledge domains. Different kinds and roles
of networks were considered in more detail in Chapter 8. Here, the term ‘net-
worked innovation’ denotes a distinctive category, or type, of innovation process
‘that occurs through relationships that are negotiated in an ongoing communi-
cative process, and which rely on neither market nor hierarchical mechanisms of
control’ (cf. Hardy et al., 2003; Swan and Scarbrough, 2005). This definition
makes a distinction between networked innovation and innovation processes
that are driven primarily by hierarchical and/or market-based mechanisms (e.g.
innovation in supply-chain relationships or top-down organizational change ini-
tiatives). It also includes intra- and inter-organizational relationships and com-
petitive, as well as collaborative, relationships. Indeed the boundaries between
inter- and intra-organizational relationships are often very blurred during innova-
tion processes. Also competitive relations can be just as important in networked
innovation as collaborative relations, for example in generating, or overcoming,
resistance to change (Alter and Hage, 1993; Elg and Johansson, 1997).
The Medico case above is a good example of networked innovation. In this
case the Medico team lacked hierarchical power over the professional groups that
they needed to influence, and were generally viewed with suspicion for having
purely commercial objectives. This meant that any attempts to directly market
their product to clinicians would have failed. Faced with this very challenging
networked innovation their strategy for managing knowledge rested on:
• Team building – creating a multidisciplinary project team whose member-
ship actually refl ected the different interests of the specialist groups that they
needed to infl uence (it included, for example, people with scientifi c, medical
and commercial backgrounds).
• Network formation – building and orchestrating both intra-organizational
relationships (between the Medico team and sales staff needed to market
their ‘orphan’ product) and also inter-organizational networks (between the
Medico staff and different communities of medical practitioners).

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