Page 216 -

MANAGING KNOWLEDGE FOR INNOVATION 205

• process power – the power derived from organizational decision-making pro-
cesses, procedures and political routines that enable or prevent certain groups
from participating in decision-making.
• meaning power – the power that operates through the semantic and symbolic
aspects of organizational life (such as cultural norms and expectations) and
that legitimizes (or de-legitimizes) particular activities.

Linking these wider sources of power to the dynamics of networked innovation
has important implications. It tells us that building social networks can shape the
distribution of not just resources, but also of process power and meaning power
by creating new patterns of interdependencies between groups (Hardy et al.,
2003). Process power, then, results in part from an actor’s particular position in
the network and their ability to act as ‘obligatory passage points’ in the decision
process (Callon, 1980). For example, while the Medico team could not have
directly controlled decisions amongst medical staff over treatment standards,
they did acquire process power by abstracting and editing critical scientific and
educational materials (including the public website) and by moulding the infor-
mal channels through which different groups had access to information. The
careful selection of Medico Team members and opinion leaders (i.e. people who
could link the Medico project to the interests of different stakeholders) further
enhanced their process power.
However, the major strategy of Medico managers was to use meaning power
to legitimate new forms of collaboration and knowledge integration. The
innovation was framed, then, not in terms of Healthco’s own product, but in
terms of the importance of curing the prostate cancer disease by developing
brachytherapy as a treatment. The discourses of ‘community of care’ and ‘Cen-
tres of Excellence’ appealed to multiple professional interests and were crucial
in reframing, what were at one level blatant commercial goals, as medical goals.
This both lowered potential resistance and encouraged new networks to form
across groups, so further encouraging knowledge integration through the for-
mation of a new ‘community of practice’ around this particular form of cancer
treatment.
Paying attention to the different kinds of power, then, suggests that the abil-
ity to mobilize networked innovation depends on managing – in a ‘middle-
out’, rather than ‘top down’, sense – the generative relationship between power,
network formation and knowledge integration. This relationship, as played out
in the Medico case, is outlined in Figure 9.4. Hence we can see how Medico’s
cultivation of networks and the exercise of alternative sources of power (pro-
cess and meaning power) facilitated both knowledge integration and the further
generation of new networks, and contributed to successful innovation outcomes.
As Dougherty and Hardy (1996) put it, for organizations to become innova-
tive they must ‘reconfigure the power embedded in the organizational system –
in its resources, processes and meanings’. Of course, this relationship between
network building, power and knowledge integration is by no means smooth or

6/5/09 7:20:36 AM
9780230_522015_10_cha09.indd 205 6/5/09 7:20:36 AM
9780230_522015_10_cha09.indd 205