Unpacking Novelty: The Anatomy of Vision Advantages

Abstract

The Strength of Weak Ties and Brokerage Theory rely on the argument that weak bridging ties deliver novel information to brokers. Yet our conceptualization of novelty itself is fundamentally underdeveloped. We therefore develop a theory of how three distinct types of novelty – diversity, total non-redundancy and uniqueness – combine with network structure to create vision advantages. We test our theory using panel data on an evolving corporate email network in a medium-sized digital media firm over twelve months. Three main results emerge from our analysis. First, we confirm the Diversity-Bandwidth Tradeoff at the heart of the vision advantage. As brokers networks become more diverse, their channel bandwidth contracts, creating countervailing effects on access to novel information. Second, we uncover the mechanisms driving the Diversity-Bandwidth Tradeoff and highlight differences in vision advantages across ties. Strong cohesive ties deliver greater information diversity and more total non-redundant information, while weak bridging ties contribute the greatest uniqueness – information which is most different from what other contacts deliver. Third, we find network diversity (or inversely, network constraint) is the dominant factor in the relationship between network structure and longitudinal entropy. This result suggests that weak bridging ties, which provide unique information through low bandwidth, structurally diverse channels, contribute the most to the aggregation of novel information over time.

Keywords: information worker productivity, networks, communication, information exchange, information channels, information flow, knowledge transfer, content analysis, email data